Fresh from the Beetronics hive mind comes a new dual overdrive pedal that, typical of the brand, is not your average drive. Okay, it is in a sense, because the Wannabee Beelateral Buzz is inspired by two classic overdrives – the Klon Centaur and the Bluesbreaker – but it presents these sounds in an all-new format.
Consider the Wannabe derivative of drive, visionary in presentation, with each circuit featuring three different flavours (or voicings), and the pedal’s circuitry designed to allow players to run the K-style into the BB-style or vice versa, or to blend the drives and run them in parallel, in effect offering players a stackable overdrive housed in one compact enclosure.
There are a lot of knobs – six in total – and a lot of colours, plus the usual pedals-as-art enclosures available via the Beetronics Custom Shop for those in the process of curating the perfectly Instagrammable pedalboard.
But the layout is not going to sting the luddite guitarists who prefer a simple drive. Just think of the Wannabe as two three-kmob overdrives with switches that allow you to switch up the order of the drives without removing a patch cable.
Each drive circuit has its own individual footswitch, dials for Honey (gain), Taste (tone), and Volume (master volume), and three-way voicing switch.
Circuit #0, which is inspired by the Bluesbreaker and is described as “vintage amp tones with clarity and warmth”, has mid boost, flat and low end boost voicings. Circuit #1, which is voiced for all your Klon-style “transparent overdrive” needs, has switchable no clean blend, medium clean blend and full clean blend flavours.
A routing switch rounds out your controls, allowing you to send one drive into another or run them in parallel.
This is where Beetronics says the Wannabee has the edge over your common or garden variety twofer drive, allowing players to find new textures to their electric guitar tone by running both circuits in parallel and mixing them using their respective volume controls.
Simple, and it allows one drive to drive the other and interact in all kinds of musical ways. By the sounds of the demos there are is plenty of room for manoeuvre, with quasi-fuzz sounds at the extremes (we would expect nothing less from the brand that brought us the Abelha Tropical Fuzz, Octahive and Swarm Fuzz Harmonizer).
The Wannabe Beelateral Buzz is available now, priced £245 for the regular production line unit, £327 for a Custom Shop model.
See Beetronics FX for more details.
