Drunk Beaver's 14th Pedal Drop is a beautifully Evolved and Expanded take on the Lead Channel of the cult classic Boss SD-2 Dual OverDrive

The Boss SD-2 is considered by many to be Boss’s best ever gain / distortion pedal - primarily when considering the Lead Channel of course. If this was ever to be reissued by Boss - then the Crunch Channel needs a little tightening up and refinement.

The Lead Distortion Channel though is just beautifully textured and potent - and actually pretty high gain to be on a pedal labelled ’OverDrive’. On the original pedal you had 2 sets of 2 dual-concentric knobs which controlled Level, Tone, and Drive for each Channel, the final 4th knob was a rotary selector where you could select which of the voicings you were activating with the Footswitch - either Crunch or Lead, or alternating Crunch & Lead, or with a Remote switch attached the main footswitch would activate the pedal, and the secondary remote would switch channels!. The SD-2 was manufactured over a period of circa 5 years, from 1993 to 1998 - it’s one of my favourite Boss pedals for sure.

Now while the Drunk Beaver Kyiv Lead is based on the SD-2s Lead Channel, it’s quite a bit evolved from there - with the single Tone Control of the original - becoming a sort of 4-Band EQ here - with Treble, Mid, Bass, and Presence.

Vitalii reports that the Kyiv Lead is a highly modded take - with several adjustments to its many (5) gain stages, for instance using a hybrid Ge/Si/LED clipping combo instead of 2 x LEDs, and having different op-amps too - JRC4580 instead of 4558. 

In real terms it is rather more of a redesign than a clone. The Tone Stack is roughly Marshall style - mid-scooped and amp like, where each pot affects / interacts with the others. It is still quite fat and dark, but has a lot of room for adjustment.

Of the 5 amp-topology-like cascaded gain stages, you have a 1kHz Mid Boost at the start, then 2 further gain stages, with hard clipping profiles, then a sort of OD style gain stage with feedback loop diodes, then finally one more gain stage and the EQ.

It really is pretty high gain even with said knob dialled down pretty low, and for most has a touch Marshalliness about its texture - which for me and a few others can be coaxed into Rat-sounding territory - while this is quite a different circuit topology to that.

Many have talked about extracting the SD-2 Lead Channel and beefing it up somewhat with suitably complementary controls - and that’s pretty much exactly what Vitalii has done here.

There’s legions of us who really rate the SD-2, so I would imagine that this Pedal Drop will be scooped up incredibly quickly. Of course it will be live on the Drunk Beaver Reverb.com Store - as soon as you see this article. So you had better have your $150 ready - as these may disappear very quickly indeed.

I’m really looking forward to getting my hands on mine. Vitalii’s 2nd Boss take Pedal Drop - the Mykolaiv Grunge - based on the PW-2 has been my favourite to date - but I have a feeling that it’s about to be pushed aside by the Kyiv Lead!

It really has the most beautiful texture and harmonics - Vitalii and I feel that the Boss engineers slaved a long time over the Lead Channel to get its texture just right - wish that they had spent nearly as much time on the Crunch-side! Perhaps that can be a further project for Vitalii at some stage to bring the Crunch Channel up to a similar level of quality to its over-shadowing Lead!