SolidGoldFX Applies its Imperial Fuzz Slider template to the legendary 90's Marshall Blues Breaker format for its new Commodore Overdrive

When SolidGoldFX (SGFX) launched its Imperial MKII Fuzz last year I was kind of in two minds about it. I love the 4-slider controls and topology - Volume, Tone, Contour, and Fuzz. While I would probably have preferred a narrower form-factor or vertical / tall BBD format - versus the landscape orientation solution adopted.

I feel that the pedal would be near enough just as controllable in vertical orientation - and more pedalboard-friendly to boot. Where SGFX though has kind of long established this horizontal format across a large number of its pedals. It just doesn’t make these sorts of pedals particularly easy to accommodate in my own rig. And we well know that Pedalboard Tetris has to be an ongoing consideration!

The new Commodore Overdrive sees a near identical design template to the Imperial - just with the accent colour in blue instead of red. All the sliders / labels are the same as before. I love the tactile nature of sliders and slide-based pedals always tend to be more fun to deploy.

"The Commodore offers a fresh spin on an old-school heavyweight by mating a specially tuned, low to mid-gain BB style drive circuit with the super sculpting output section of our Imperial MkII. Carefully selected component values and asymmetric clipping offer an organic and natural sounding drive ranging from sweet and mellow to hot and spicy, while the Tone and Con-tour sliders allow you to dial in anything from black panel spank to Vox-ey chime and British growl."

It’s not like there aren’t a lot of decent Blues Breakers out there already - while it’s the format here which makes this particular one so appealing - of course if you can accommodate it within your rig. You also have the King of Tone, Duellist, Protein and others to contend with in a similar sized enclosure. While the playability and controllability of the Commodore is obviously its significant advantage. It goes up agains a select number of really formidable compact enclosure units - but none of those have sliders! So it really depends here on how much you like sliders!

The Commodore Overdrive is available right now direct from the SGFX Webstore for $199 | €229 | £199 equivalent - and should be in key dealers hands soon enough too!