NPD: Joyo Sweet Baby overdrive

vasselmeyer

I can't help it. I flogged nearly all my old pedals when I bought a Line 6 M13 stompbox emulator. Unfortunately I've started buying new ones. But what can I do when the GAS calls?

This time, I'm [mostly] going cheap. After I bought the Joyo AC-Tone for less than £30 shipped and being astounded at how good it actually was, I laid out a similar amount for the Joyo Sweet Baby overdrive which is a clone of the Mad Professor Sweet Honey. Sweet Honey/Sweet Baby...you see what Joyo did there? Very clever.

Anyway, just like the AC-Tone, for £30 I can't really believe how good the pedal sounds. It goes from a mild just-breakup to a decent crunch. The crunch is very valve-like although it does colour the tone somewhat. This means that leaving it on all the time on a clean channel will need the amp EQ to be tweaked. The pedal is very touch sensitive so backing off the guitar volume will clean up the sound very well.

The three controls are volume, drive and a tone control which is a little hard to describe in terms of how it changes the sound. The best way I can explain it is to say it has a very mild effect on the positioning of a mid-hump with a slightly more "trebly mid" (if there's such a thing) when turned clockwise.

Build wise, you can see why it's £30. The switch feels cheap and I'm fairly sure that the jacks won't last very long. I can't imagine what Joyo were thinking when they put the power input in FRONT of the input jack. They have done the same on the AC-Tone so I imagine that's just how the build the pedals. They're just waiting to be stepped on. However, the build quality doesn't matter to me because I think I'm going to buy a Joyo PXL-Pro switcher and I can put it in one of the loops as an always on pedal and just bring it in with the switcher. I like the M13 very much and in latch mode it'll be as good as the PXL-Pro but somehow it's nice to tinker with the physical sensation of arranging a pedal board and messing with jacks and power.

Joyo Sweet Baby overdrive. For £30, you can't go wrong.

Dave_Mc

Mine sounds pretty good too (really good for the price). My only complaint is i'm not really sure what to use it for ) It's also not super high gain, it's definitely a low gain od (even compared to things like a tubescreamer or sd1).

David5150

Nice pedal. I used mine with the JVM for a few low-gain cover songs we throw into our set – summer of 69 etc.

Shame I fried it when it accidently got plugged into the 18v AC power supply for my blackstar Ht Dual pedal!!

exocet

Great low gain pedal, works well with a Strat.