Electro Harmonix East River Drive

I have always loved the sound of the original tube screamer unfortunately they are very expensive so I bought the East River Drive and I wasn't disappointed.

Pros:

- It has a wide range of tone for an OD pedal, you can easily get a subtle clean boost or a dirtier distortion sound. Very versatile.
- Great tube screamer clone for the price.
- It works well when stacked with other overdrive pedals.
- Pedalboard friendly.

Cons:

- You wont get a fully transparent drive with this pedal
- As all of EHX pedals the switch is a bit noisy, when you press it you'll hear an hard clicking noise.

The East River Drive is a great unit. The drive it adds is quite subtle, suitable for use in bluesy rock but cannot deliver highly saturated and distorted tones. It is very responsive to velocity, so if you dial it in right you can have a clean tone which begins to drive if you hit it just a bit harder, very useful for moody solos.

Has the usual EHX build quality in sturdy metal box, very small as well. Three knobs provide all the shaping required.

On the downside there is very little variety of tones available, so would have to be alongside a selection of other pedals in a versatile rig. However since the mini EHX range is competitively priced you can have a few set up together. Also the tone knob doesn't really provide enough variation so would recommend having an equaliser alongside.

On an entirely frivolous note, I love the graphic on the front! Really atmospheric.

a quality ts style pedal for under £40 yes please.
what you get is great warm sounding green overdrive that can function as a nice clean boost with the drive low to a moderate to heavy crunch with the drive maxed.
lead lines sound great and you can dial in some real nice rhythm tones.
the only small gripe i have ( and it is a small gripe) is the foot switch has a real clunk and you need to press pretty hard i would have preferred a smoother feeling switch. the clunk isn't audible through my amp and for this little money its not a problem. however the rest of unit feels really well built
great product very happy.

I wanted a tubescreamer type pedal to use as a boost for a valve amp to get some additional gain from my amp.
So far I have used it with the gain at minimum and level at maximum. Then I can use the tone to either keep a similar sound to the bypass (this seems to be about 10 o'clock) or make it a bit more trebly for solos.
My amp is single channel (Hayden Mofo 30W) and I didn't want to use a distortion or OD pedal to get clean/distorted sounds.
So I have the amp set at a mild crunch setting which I can clean up with guitar volume. Then when I kick in the ERD with gain at zero it produces a great classic rock tone. So I get a 2 channel amp from this pedal.
The gain sounds from the pedal sound pretty authentic, but I'm not planning on using it this way much.
I'd prefer if it was easier to change the battery (you have to open up the whole case), but no big deal.
In summary, a very good value tubescreamer clone with nice stylings and a very solid build.