The Open Road Overdrive and Truetone Clean Boost are useful, affordable tools that play well together.
Click here to download a jam recorded by the reviewer using both pedals.
Hard gigging pros who live on the road know that good tone can come and go with the wind. Venues change, back lines rotate, and equipment that breaks gets replaced or repaired, sometimes with unintended results. The idea of carting around expensive or irreplaceable boutique amps begins to take on a questionable logic. For all but a few players, it is the pedalboard, not the amplifier, that becomes the reliable backbone of a signature sound. Second only to a few trusted guitars, the pedalboard is your sound. And even the most renowned players, who can afford to carry road cases full of one-off handwired amps, still largely rely on the pedalboard to define their sound.
The folks at Visual Sound have an uncanny understanding of the road warrior musician, and what makes him tick. They seem to really get the degree to which guitarists lean on their pedals for their signature tone. Visual Sound’s latest salvo into the extremely competitive stompbox market is their Truetone Clean Boost and Open Road Overdrive pedals. Let’s hit the road, and put the pedal to the metal—and the pedals to the test.
Open Road Overdrive
Visual Sound’s newest overdrive unit is a refinement of the company’s earlier Route 808 Overdrive, which itself was a wellcrafted clone of the classic Ibanez TS-808 Tube Screamer. The Open Road Overdrive is a new animal entirely, primarily because it addresses the shortcomings in its predecessors. One of the most frequent gripes about stompbox overdrives is their overabundance of midrange frequencies. The midrange spike can really build up in the studio come mix time, and it can take its toll on stage, even though lots of mids are a natural outgrowth of the way an overdrive clips the incoming signal.
The Open Road does well to preserve the fundamental frequencies—the bottom end—while delivering the flavor up top, and the Tone knob adds sparkle to the top end when turned clockwise, but without adding an overabundance of midrange. At no time did the tone become obnoxious or overbearing. The engineers at Visual Sound have done a nice job here, making this dial more than just the sonic equivalent of choosing between a fine or coarse cheese grater.
With the Drive dial cranked, the Open Road oozed with plexi goodness, especially when goaded by a Les Paul Custom loaded with humbuckers. With an American Strat packing traditional single coils and the Drive knob set less aggressively, we found ourselves squarely in classic Fender Twin territory. The one thing the Open Road doesn’t do is the over-the-top shred fest; if you’re looking for a box to deliver apocalyptic metal mayhem, this is not it.
The Volume knob allows you to control how hard you hit the amplifier’s preamp stage, and thus further invites you to dial in more tone. I tested the Open Road with a Line 6 Spider Valve 1x12” amp, which has a tube preamp, a tube power amp, and 12 digital amp models. We set it on the “plain Jane” vanilla clean setting, the least forgiving setting for a unit like this (in fact, the sound clips were recorded entirely from the Line 6’s high-Z line out and the clean amp model). The Volume control helped beef up the output nicely.
Larger boxes, like the Visual Sound housing, do take up more space on the pedalboard,and if they’re made with the requisite robustness that roadwork requires (this one is), they’re also heavier. I favor the larger boxes for their ruggedness. Moreover, the Visual Sound Open Road has a substantially wider button, which looks like mil-spec hardware left over from the Soviet space program.
Above all else, I came away with the sense that the Open Road was more of an amp simulator than a distortion box. The Tone knob took on many characteristics of a tube amp’s presence control, while the Drive knob acted like an amp’s hot channel preamp gain stage. Lower settings produced the smokey sounding onset of clipping that is normally heard from a tube amp on the brink of breakup. It was easy and fun to flirt with that edge with some dynamic picking, or by rolling into the guitar’s volume control. The Open Road Overdrive has a fat, ballsy tone that doesn’t shortchange the often-neglected bottom end. It’s got a presence that shimmers up top, without sounding plastic or transistorized. It’s going to give you a reliable, organic, authentic tube-amp tone from even the cheesiest solid-state ’80s amp.
Buy if...
you're looking for a well-rounded, organic tube-amp-style overdrive. Skip if...
death metal is your thing, and you consider yourself the spawn of Satan. Rating...
Truetone Clean Boost
The Visual Sound Truetone Clean Boost pedal is deceptively simple: two knobs, and an On/Off button. That’s it. It’s like a supercharger bolted to an already healthy V-8 engine. It will boost everything by a factor that can be set with the Volume knob. Whatever tonal nuances you bestow to your incoming signal will be amplified or accentuated. In point of fact, the Truetone Clean Boost is two tools in one. In its simplest guise, it’s a high-gain preamp. In a world of complex digital effects with computers running algorithms, the Clean Boost might seem a bit of a throwback, but for the vast majority of road-going bands, there’s no monitor engineer, or even a mix engineer. If you need to step up for a solo, you need to be able to just hit the gas and go.
This pedal is best with an amp with lots of headroom. A boost to the incoming signal isn’t going to be terribly effective if the power amp is sending out a clipped signal. In recent years, there has been a trend towards using very clean tube power amps with all of the tone sculpting coming from pedals and other outboard gear. Players who value dynamics get the maximum benefit, and the tube saturation of the amp is still an integral part of the sound.
When used as a quasi-overdrive, the Clean Boost excels, provided it’s hitting the “right” preamp. The Clean Boost provides a fat, mostly unadulterated signal (depending on the tone setting). If you’ve got vintage tweed, a plexi, or any type of warm, multistage tube amp, the Clean Boost is going to catapult you into the pleasure zone without making your ears bleed. The simple Tone knob works best when conceptualized in the classic sense of an equalizer—tamping down a high end that’s too strident, or adding some sharpness to a dull, swampy signal. When positioned between a Stratocaster and the Line 6 Spider Valve combo amp, the Clean Boost beefed up the bottom end, hitting the preamp hard for some authentic, old-time overdrive. In this situation, the tone control allowed me to roll off some extra high end which was having an undesirable effect on the natural overdrive of the amp. When the Strat was switched out for the Les Paul Custom, I needed some extra high-end boost.
Like the Open Road Overdrive, the Truetone Clean Boost also gets the benefit of Visual Sound’s formidable housing and robust foot switch. But the aluminum shell of the Truetone’s volume knob had come unglued from its plastic core. The metal knobs are cosmetic caps that are glued onto the plastic core, into which the metal shaft of the pot is locked. According to Visual Sound, this is a rare problem that occurs during shipping, and they will replace any defective knobs.
Buy if...
your amp or overdrive unit needs an extra kick in the pants at just the right time. Skip if...
you've got a channel-switching tube amp with great gain staging options. Rating...
The Final Mojo Armed with just the Open Road Overdrive and the Truetone Clean Boost, I’d feel confident walking into any joint, plugging them in to any random guitar amp and laying down some righteous jams. With the Open Road Overdrive punching up the bottom (while keeping the top sizzling along), it all promises to be a fun-packed, high-speed road trip. The Truetone Clean Boost likewise will provide serious passing power on your musical highway when you need it the most. In the studio, we were rewarded with inspiring tone right out of the box—even when our test units were placed at a tonal disadvantage. These are workhorse pieces at a terrific price, and if you’re the kind of guitarist who likes to toneshape with foot pedals, both of these will provide rewarding jams.
Editor’s note: the print version of this review originally contained incorrect information regarding the Volume knob of the Truetone Clean Boost, the aluminum shell of which came unglued from its plastic core during shipping. The html version of the review has been corrected. We regret the error.
An immersive reverb with a carefully selected palette of other secondary fx and features that extend a strong foundational reverb tone to new perspectives of creativity.
3 modes offer luxurious options for exploration like a rotating room effect, adjustable up and down octaves and modulation that can be triggered dynamically. The Deity is also packed with extensive controls for the most impactful parameters for each effect to insure that every great sound is deeply adjustable where it counts.
DECAY - Sets the Length of the reverb trail. Set to zero in order to eliminate the reverb and get the modulation to effect your clean signal instead.
TONE/OSC Tone control (LPF) - for the Reverb trail. When set to zero (counter clockwise), a slow oscillation begins that sounds as if you're spinning slowly. At this setting, the Low Pass Filter is Self Oscillating from zero to max at a rate of 4 seconds per cycle.
MIX - Pans between 100% dry and 100% wet signals. In order to get more pronounced modulation set it beyond 12 o'clock. Use it to isolate the clean signal from the Reverb or to blend in your clean signal with the additional octaves.
PRE DELAY - Changes the size of the perceived space/room. At minimum, it makes the reverb come in immediately after you pick a note. (This control also helps in keeping the reverb trail out of the way of your dry signal, making it sound clearer).
SENTIENT MODE - Deeply immersive reverb with added modulation. A cross between tremolo and filter. Control the modulation with your playing dynamics or by using the LFO controls.
DEPTH/LFO - Determine how deep the modulation effect will be. When this knob is set to max, the LFO is initiated and the depth is maxed. The rate of modulation can now be set by the sense/rate knob.
SENSE/RATE - Determines how sensitive the Deity will be to your playing dynamics. When knob 2 is set to LFO, the sense/rate controls the rate of the modulation.
ETHEREAL MODE - Heavenly reverb with added choir-like octaves and independent octave volume controls.
OCTAVEDOWN - controls octave down volume.
OCTAVEUP - controls octave up volume.
FOOTSWITCH - To choose between True Bypass & Buffered Bypass with Trails, hold the footswitch for 3 seconds. The LED will indicate the switching method by blinking in Red for Trails/Blue for Bypass.
Relay True Bypass - (A more reliable, more durable footswitch)
Sam Fender shares a moment with his saxophonist and childhood friend, Johnny "Blue Hat" Davis, at London's O2 Brixton Academy in September 2021.
Photo by Linda Brindley
The British songwriter traversed the bleak thoroughfares of his past while writing his autobiographical sophomore album, Seventeen Going Under—a tale of growing up down-and-out, set to an epic chorus of Jazzmasters and soaring sax.
British songwriter Sam Fender hails from North Shields, England, an industrial coastal port town near the North Sea, about eight miles northeast of Newcastle upon Tyne. Fender grew up in this small village, which he calls "a drinking town with a fishing problem." He lived there with his mother on a council estate, a type of British public housing. This is the mise-en-scène for Sam Fender's coming-of-age autobiographical new album, Seventeen Going Under. On the album's cover, a photograph shows Sam sitting on a brick stoop.
"That was a back lane that I used to go down and smoke weed when I was about 15 with a bunch of tearaways," Fender says in his regional "Geordie" accent. "That back lane leads into this estate called Meadow Well, which was an estate that had 80 percent unemployment where we grew up. There was a lot of riots there back in the '90s. It was practically on fire for the whole of 1991. Parts of it were just a wasteland for teenagers, and that's where we used to go and sit and hang out and stuff."
About a mile from that stoop is the Low Lights Tavern, where Fender tended bar after high school, and it's also where he played his music in the early days. Fender's manager, Owain Davies, first heard him play guitar there in 2013 in the corner of the pub. Davies immediately took Fender on as an artist, telling U.K. music industry trade paper Music Week: "He's just an undeniable talent, he's hard to ignore."
Sam Fender - Seventeen Going Under (Official Video)
Indeed, Fender's lyrics stop you in your tracks. These are from the title track of Seventeen Going Under:
I was far too scared to hit him
But I would hit him in a heartbeat now
That's the thing with anger
It begs to stick around
So it can fleece you of your beauty
And leave you spent with nowt to offer
It makes you hurt the ones who love you
You hurt them like they're nothing
After hooking up with Davies, Fender doubled down on gigging and writing, gaining fans and traction, and eventually won the 2018 BRIT Critics' Choice Award before releasing his first album, Hypersonic Missiles, in late 2019. Taking a slow-burn route of building a following for six years before releasing a full-length likely contributed to that album instantly having wings, debuting at No. 1 on the U.K. Albums Chart. Fender's sound and identity as an artist coalesced, with his songwriting skills bucking pop formula. "Hypersonic Missiles" weaves a love story in between musings about "feeding the corporate machine" and "kids in Gaza being bombed." In "Dead Boys," Fender vulnerably grieves fallen mates, victims of the male suicide epidemic in Northern England. Jangly Jazzmasters and epic, chorus-drenched solos play a lead character through it all.
Thematically, Fender, who is 27, gazed outward on Hypersonic Missiles, but he goes deeply inward on Seventeen Going Under. It's literally the soundtrack of his adolescence. "It's mainly about self-esteem, growing up, and the political landscape of England, and how that affects the Northeast and how the Tories basically alienate my hometown and the people that live there," he says. These songs of tribulation are resonating strongly with Britons, and landed Fender another No. 1 album in the U.K. when Seventeen Going Under came out in October 2021.
TIDBIT: Seventeen Going Under was recorded at Wor House (Sam Fender's studio) in North Shields, England, and Grouse Lodge in Ireland. It was mixed by Craig Silvey (Arcade Fire) and produced by Bramwell Bronte.
"I feel like it's my first proper album," says Fender. "The first record was a hodgepodge of songs written over six years. Some of the songs were written when I was 19. I was a baby when I wrote some of the songs on that album. Whereas this is a collective piece of work written over the course of two years. And I feel like it's more cohesive as a piece of work. I think it has continuity. I think it has a sound."
The album might've turned out completely different if not for the pandemic, which resulted in a prolific writing period for Fender, who was forced to quarantine. "I've got a health condition, which affects my immune system, so I had to stay in the house. I was alone, so there was a lot of reflection, a lot of looking back at the past," he recalls. "I was doing therapy at the same time to try and get my head screwed on, and I ended up dissecting my whole childhood in therapy. And then learnin' about the reason why I was the way I was; the reason why I was reacting to things in certain ways; the reason why my relationships weren't goin' well; the reason why I wasn't being the most savory character or not being my own ally. I was kinda making life hard for myself."
And so, this reckoning unfolds throughout 11 tracks. The title song documents a dark time when Fender's mother was battling health issues and couldn't make ends meet. It's a banger that cuts right to the struggle of feeling helpless as a teenager—being old enough to know what's going on but being too young to fix anything.
Sam Fender's Gear
"I like a Jazzmaster through a Fender Twin," says Sam Fender. "I like a bit of compression, just to kind of give you that bite, and I love an old Electro-Harmonix Small Clone, just the original cheap chorus pedal."
Photo by Laura Brindley
Guitars
Fender American Pro Jazzmaster 1959 Fender Jazzmaster Fender Stratocaster Martin 000X1AE Takamine acoustic (gift from Elton John)
Amps
Fender '65 Twin Reverb
Fender '65 Deluxe Reverb
Fender '68 Custom Deluxe Reverb
Strings
D'Addario EXL115 Nickel Wound (.011–.049)
Effects
Electro-Harmonix Small Clone
Electro-Harmonix Small Stone Phase Shifter
Electro-Harmonix Green Russian Big Muff Pi
Electro-Harmonix Holy Grail Nano
Electro-Harmonix Memory Man
Electro-Harmonix POG2
Electro-Harmonix Stereo Polychorus
Fulltone OCD
Origin Effects Cali76 Compact Deluxe
Mooer Yellow Comp
Strymon BigSky Reverberator
Boss RE-20 Space Echo
Way Huge Red Llama 25th Anniversary Overdrive
Gamechanger Audio PLUS
"Spit of You" is about his dad and the complicated relationships between sons and fathers. "Me and my dad had a five-year period where we didn't get on very well," Fender shares. "He lived in a different country. As things have progressed with my career, we started hanging out a lot more. It's about a father and son's relationship and the inability to talk about anything other than DIY, music, or alcohol. If anything, it's a just declaration of love for my old man. And funny enough, it's his favorite song."
Not all the songs chew over familial dynamics. Fender dissects his own communication and romantic failures on "Get You Down," and there's externally pointed angst on the album's two political tracks: the rebellious anthem "Aye," which pokes and prods around class/wealth disparity, and "Long Way Off," which Fender says sounds like "a Bond movie theme" with its grandiose instrumentation.
"It's got 164 tracks of audio," Fender says of the latter. "It just built and built and built and became this huge orchestral track. It's about political polarity and how I feel a lack of identity with any of the political parties currently in my country. I think it's quite a unanimous feeling in a lot of places at the moment. A lot of working-class people in England feel displaced by it all, and in my hometown as well. It was written around the time when all the Trump supporters were storming the capital building. We're a long way off from sorting out the mess the world is in."
“It’s such a refreshing rehash of ’80s music. It makes me think that a lot of the sounds in the ’80s that sound jarring and cheesy, I feel like it was just because it was the early days with synthesizers and them sorts of guitar sounds.”
All of the songs were written by Fender, who played guitar, bass, piano, Hammond organ, synthesizers, glockenspiel, mandolin, and harmonica inside the North Shields studio he built by necessity during that time. The album has horns and strings across it, and Fender also wrote the string arrangements, though he didn't play those parts himself. His five band members, most of whom he grew up with—drummer Drew Michael, guitarist Dean Thompson, bassist Tom Ungerer, guitarist and keyboardist Joe Atkinson, and saxist Johnny "Blue Hat" Davis—play on the album as well. It was produced by Thom Lewis, aka "Bramwell Bronte," Fender's longtime collaborator who also produced Hypersonic Missiles.
Fender has a homespun grit much like his idol Bruce Springsteen, whose working-class ethos and songs from the heartland resonated with Fender at an early age. (The Boss connection has earned Fender the nickname of "Geordie Springsteen.") Fender's sound has a tinge of throwback and noticeable nods to his influences (cough, cough, sexy saxophone solos), but the magic lies in how he connects on so many levels with cinematic arrangements, bull's-eye lyrics, and sincere delivery. The songs are a baring of the heart, a showcase of human struggle.
His father and older brother (nine years his senior) are also musicians who gigged around town, obviously influencing Fender's journey down the troubadour road. "I got a guitar when I was 8 and started mucking around with it then. By the time I was 10, I was starting to get quite proficient," Fender shares. "And then as I got older, I realized at school there was always a couple of kids that could shred, and could really, really play. And I just thought, I don't wanna spend the rest of my life learnin' guitar just to be that—I wanna make songs, ya know?" As a kid, he was obsessed with Slash, Page, and Hendrix. "Then my brother started showin' us Springsteen and all that. I loved Oasis and all the British stuff as well."
“I felt like it could be powerful and delicate and all the things in between. That’s when I started singing properly, is after hearing Jeff Buckley.”
Photo by Charlotte Patmore
But a gamechanger came when Fender was 14 and his brother gave him Jeff Buckley's Grace. "I always had quite a high voice for a tall … I'm 6'1," he says. "Normally that means you're, like, a baritone, but I'm, like, quite a high tenor. When my brother gave us Jeff Buckley, I was like alright, he does that, and it's rock 'n' roll, and it sounds cool. That means I can do this as well [laughs]. I felt like it could be powerful and delicate and all the things in between. That's when I started singing properly, is after hearing Jeff Buckley. I always wanted to have a voice that was, like, "rawr"—gruff 'n' stuff—when I was a kid, but then I realized, well, that's not really who I am."
Sonically, the War on Drugs is one of Fender's favorite bands. Their impact on how he approaches crafting song parts can be heard in "Last To Make It Home," particularly the expansive guitar solo on the outro. "I had the Fender Twin up, like, so loud that my ears were bleedin', with my whammy bar," Fender says of recording that solo, "and whichever way I turned, I got that feedback. You get that sort of 'Champagne Supernova' endin'," Fender says. (WoD frontman Adam Granduciel had signed on to mix that track, but ultimately couldn't do it because he missed the master deadline for his own album.)
"I like Springsteen for the lyrics, and I love War on Drugs for the sound," Fender shares. "I think it's such a refreshing rehash of sounds we already know—it's such a refreshing rehash of '80s music. It makes me think that a lot of the sounds in the '80s that sound jarring and cheesy, I feel like it was just because it was the early days with synthesizers and them sorts of guitar sounds. I feel like the War on Drugs have refined it. It's beautiful and I think there's more to be looked down that avenue. That's why I'm quite chorusy-soundin'—I love that sound. It's nostalgic for me, even though I'm not from the '80s, I grew up in a house where that music was playing."
“I was doing therapy at the same time to try and get my head screwed on, and I ended up dissecting my whole childhood in therapy.”
Though his new album is bursting with layers upon layers of instruments, he undoubtedly has an ingrained sense of how to be impactful with just a guitar and his voice, which came from years of performing solo without a backing band. In a BBC Radio 1 Live Lounge concert in early 2020, Fender did a solo performance of Amy Winehouse's "Back to Black," fingerpicking the melody and bass line, while nailing a rather ambitious vocal. His thumb bounces between the 5th and 6th strings, while his other fingers create a harp-like effect on the melody. "It's a strange move, but once you start getting the muscle strength, it's a constant thing and it's quite hypnotic," he says.
Fender describes his songwriting method as "chop and change." He noodles on his Jazzmaster, does some fingerpicking, or switches to another instrument. "A lot of the times I write a lot of songs on piano and convert to guitar. So, I find the chords on piano sometimes and then I'll find interesting variants of the chords on the guitar to make it sound pretty." He likes to experiment with tunings as well. Seventeen Going Under is mostly in C# standard, though he did play around a bit with Nashville tuning and light gauge strings.
When conversation turns to a special guitar he just bought, Fender lights up. "I've finally treated myself and allowed myself to buy something that was expensive because there's always an air of guilt," he says. "I've been lucky, Fender's always given us stuff. I've always had loads of free guitars because I've always been sponsored by them. But when it comes to buying stuff, there's still a part of us that thinks I'm still living in the flat with my mum on a council estate, and I still feel like I can't. I'm like, "ooh, that's a lot of money." It's like a subconscious thing. I was always quite frugal. I was always scrimpin'.
Fender primarily plays Jazzmasters, but he strapped on a Stratocaster for "Will We Talk?" at Hole 44 in Berlin, Germany, on November 4, 2021.
"But I've just bought a ridiculous Jazzmaster. It's a 1959," he continues. "It's the second year of Jazzmasters, one of the very, very first ones. It's absolutely stunning. It's got a gold scratch plate, and it came with a packet of strings from 1959 from New Brunswick."
He explains his sweet spot for tone matter-of-factly. "I like a Jazzmaster through a Fender Twin. I like a bit of compression, just to kind of give you that bite, and I love an old Electro-Harmonix Small Clone, just the original cheap chorus pedal. I think it sounds great. And every other chorus pedal I put on I'm just like 'pfft whatever.' People go, 'try this boutique $300 fucking chorus pedal.' And I put it on and it's not as good as a Small Clone. Small Clone just sounds like a chorus. And it's one knob. It's idiot proof and I'm an idiot [laughing]. That's my go-to."
At the beginning of 2022, Fender will live in New York City while recording his third album at Electric Lady Studios, which is where he'd planned to make his second album before the pandemic made that impossible. He wrote 60 songs over the last two years, recording only 11, which means he has a good stash in his back pocket. The rest of 2022 he'll be headlining arena tours, as well as supporting the Killers on four dates in London and Dublin.
On the release of such a personal collection of music, Fender recently penned a letter to his 17-year-old self. In it, he tells young Sam not to be so serious. Present-day Sam's social media is light and carefree, with videos of him explaining how to make the best cuppa, eating jellied eels, and mini movies of strangers on the street with improvised voiceovers. So, it appears time has done the songwriter well. It's all in the new album, but 27-year-old Sam had this to say to 17-year-old Sam: "Art is the purest remedy for all internal conflict and you're taking a career in it. It's an honour to do what you will do, never forget that. You may feel alone currently but you will realise that your stories, when put to music, open up a side of you that actually helps people. A lot of these stories were originally about you but they belong to everyone, as everyone has their own, and they will be screamed back at you—from clubs and dive bars, even arenas. Some kid, 17, probably going through a boatload of similar shit that you experienced, will be front and centre, screaming these stories as if it's their last night on Earth."
Sam Fender - Live at Reading Festival 2021 Full Set
With two hit albums in the last two years but no touring because of the pandemic, Sam Fender was ready for Leeds Festival 2021. Witness one of his signature chorus-and-whammy solos at 12:50 on "The Borders" from 2019's Hypersonic Missiles.
