Van Weelden Royal Overdrive 

In 2008 I got a request from one of my best friends and

a world famous guitar player to design and build an

overdrive pedal with a sound quality like never heard

before. A pedal that had to be very rich in terms of

musical harmonics with much clarity to make a great

lead sound with both humbucker and single coil pickups.

Since a full tube pedal, with the options that we

now have on the Royal Overdrive, would have been

way to expensive, we decided to come up with a solid

state pedal. As you might know, we have been working

with tubes for many years so we knew that this would

be a real challenge and maybe almost impossible to

accomplish. Just making a lot of distortion isn’t really

that hard, but it’s a completely different story if you

want to have a musically rich harmonic distortion

where you can hear every string when playing chords

with lots of sustain and also preserve the specific

characteristics of the type of guitar you are playing.

Research

First we started to check out some popular pedals

for a reference but surprisingly, a lot of them were

based on a tube screamer. However, since we had

our own personal ideas about a good overdrive

sound, none of these seemed to be a good basis

for us to start from to get the dynamic and

harmonic sound impact that we wanted to achieve.

So, we decided not to take the easy way by using

any of the existing circuits. We chose to explore

other possibilities and started our own design

completely from scratch! This approach seems to

be pretty unique these days and very, very time

consuming. It would have been a lot easier if we

had chosen the other way. But hey, we wanted to

make an original. Looking back now, we definitely

made the right choice in 2008.

Breakthrough

After 2 years of experimenting and building several

test circuits we finally had a breakthrough and found

the sound that we were looking for. This was the basis

for the design of the Royal Overdrive. From that

moment on we started to work on all the other

options we had in mind to make the Royal Overdrive a

very versatile and extremely flexible pedal. After

another 2 years of prototyping, trails and errors we

were more than satisfied and amazed by the end

result so we finally froze the design.

Result

The Royal Overdrive has become a well balanced,

very dynamic, powerful and professional solid

state overdrive pedal. The tube like sound and

especially the “elastic” tube sound where the

notes seem to explode of your pick is probably

something you never heard and felt from a pedal

before in your life!

What makes the Royal Overdrive so special?

It takes close to 400 hi-quality parts to build a Royal Overdrive, which is almost 25 times as much as some

of the popular vintage units had! The Royal Overdrive has a completely internally isolated and flexible wide

range DC input power circuit for absolute quiet performance. This was an expensive but nescessary move

we had to make and it will allow you to use all types of 9VDC to 18VDC adapters, even a modern switching

power supply, without having any hi frequency switching noise and most of all, no ground loops because of

the power supply! The Royal Overdrive also has a very hi quality PC board for the best audio performance

and circuit stability. The Royal Overdrive is the most “amp friendly” pedal in the world and can be used on

any amp including solid state amps. Try the Royal Overdrive in front of one and you will be amazed how

tube like your whole setup will sound! The Royal Overdrive has outstanding hi headroom dynamics and a

super tight, powerful low-end crunch. Together with the wide frequency range, the excellent pick attack and

articulation, the Royal Overdrive is an absolute must have for the professional and amateur guitarist who is

serious about his or her tone! The unique 6 position preset bright circuit will help you to match your Royal

Overdrive with any guitar amp. The Royal Overdrive sounds superb both in clean and crunch mode. You

will never have to make a compromise on your clean sound because the pedal and amp combination can

act as a real 2 channel setup. The Royal overdrive has a full frequency hi headroom buffered bypass mode

and is designed for use in live situations as well as at bedroom levels. It can be used for any style of music.