Drunk Beaver's 6th Pedal Drop is the Kropyvnytskyi OverDrive - based on the Exar OD-02 with added Fat and Clipping Mods

Drunk Beaver’s Vitalii Bobrov has been continuing his exploration of classic Polish pedals - resulting in him doing a number of circuit traces on native pedal brands including Exar. The Exar brand was best known for doing various takes on popular Boss pedals, while this OD-02 is quite distinctive and fairly unique in its circuit topology. The OD-02 first materialised in 1995 and was phased out in the early 2000’s - it came in a couple of different colour variations including the grey one pictured and a yellow edition.

As Vitalii explains : "It was Exar’s own circuit, definitely inspired by Boss’s discrete ODs, but simplified and voiced more as a TS type. For example, it has a passive tone control, lowpass filter, but is arranged in a way that the potentiometer controls how hard it cuts frequencies after cut-off (not the cut-off frequency itself which is the more common way) something similar to what the Fulltone OCD does."

Controls - Level, Tone, Drive, Fat : On / Stock, Clipping : LED / Diode Lift / Stock Silicon.

The circuit has 3 x 1N4148 Silicon Diodes in Asymmetrical arrangement - which is of course more typically Boss-style - like the SD-1 as an example - but with other significant differences as mentioned, to move it away from a Boss topology.

This is a discrete op-amp OD where Vitalli used the same transistors as found in his original Exar unit - 2 x J113 and BC560C. The unique tone-stack is a feedback EQ mod that moves the cut-off frequency to 350Hz. It also has a high pass filter in the feedback loop similar to a TS, at 720Hz.

Vitalii adds in two of his favourite mods here - the Fat Mod and LED clipping Mod - while you also get a No Diodes / Diode Lift option for the Clipping.

As before this is another rapid prototyping project and these pedals are literally hot of the press - meaning no demos. They always go really quickly so you need to be fast if you want one!

I’ve included a sound reference of the original below - to give you a feel for what the baseline tone of the OD-02 circuit is - the Drunk Beaver take obviously sounding slightly superior. I love both of those Drunk Beaver mods - and actually where the LED option is available - that tends to be my preferred playback mode - while I use the Fat Mod a little more selectively!

Available from the Drunk Beaver Reverb.com Store for $150 - first come first serve!