Electro Harmonix OD Glove

Very nice Marshally sounds across its wide gain range, from cleanish or slight break up, to full on heavy distortion with a humbucker guitar. Low noise, cleans up with the guitars' volume. At this price point it's unbeatable.

This has stayed in my pedal board for five years now, while distortions and fuzzes 2-5x more expensive have come and gone. I always keep returning to this, and it was about time to write a review.

I play it mostly in higher gain settings with a humbucking guitar, in a heavy Stoner Rock band, altough I have used it for a slight crunch sounds very succesfully. With the mid shift swithch up, it nicely cuts through in a band mix. Nowadays I also boost it with the TC Spark Boost (also highly recommended) for even more versatility and great sounds, altough I used it alone for many years.

It has an internal switch to ramp up the voltage to 18V for a bit more headroom and cleaner feel, but I like to keep it on 9V for a dirtier sound. At one point I even had the real OCD pedal in my board, but actually preferred the OD Glove for it's slightly more dirty-in-a-good-way sound, but YMMV of course.

PROS:
+ Versatile, nice sounds across it's wide gain range
+ Low noise compared to many distorsions
+ Dynamic, cleans up nicely with the guitar's volume pot
+ Cuts through in a band mix

CONS:
- The only one I can come up with: it may be a bit dark sounding if you have a dark amp or speakers. Not a problem at all in my set up, but I do use the Tone in it's higher settings.

My friend stumbled upon the OD glove from Electro Harmonix and I was pretty impressed from what I'd heard and for such a decent price that I ordered one straight away. Fast arrival and excellent customer service as always from Thomann.

Before I plugged it in I was a little deflated at the artwork. Electro Harmonix need to start paying for some better artists, their latest series of pedals have the most unattractive designs, nothing up to the standard of their stylish and thematic silk screened boxes of old.

The pedal somewhat justified itself somewhat when it was plugged in. I've owned a few drive pedals before and what stood out for me with the Glove was its responsiveness to my playing dynamic. Without twisting a knob I could get warm cleans that turned into thick distortion just with my playing style. This meant I could replace all my various levels of overdrive and distortion and just use the one pedal if I so wished.

The sound of the pedal itself was pretty neat. It's a chunky drive, some fuzzy sorts of sounds with the gain after about 3o'clock. Thick and compressed but the clarity of each string certainly comes through. It gives a really rich and warm element to the tone, not an annoying fizz that is so many distortions, certainly at this price range. The only place I noticed it really fell down was when I recently upgraded to a tube amp and speaker cab, and discovered that it really sucked a lot of low and high end out of the signal, and the change in tone was quite dramatic. For the most part, nobody would ever hear/ notice/ care besides you. I would say that the glove is an excellent small tool that will add a lot of little flavours to your sound. Its versatility is well worth the price and the quality, while not outstanding, certainly beats a lot of distortions worth a lot more that are on the market. It will also last you I threw it against my wall when I was angry and it's still working same as ever, so...