There are all kinds of Tube Screamers on the market. There are OG replicas, mini-pedals, hand-wired Ibanez limited edition versions, and more clones than we care to count.
After all, it is one of the most copied overdrive pedals of all time. That’s a lot of green boxes. In 2025, the Tube Screamer clone is ubiquitous.
So when we say there’s a new Tube Screamer in town, it’s called the Source Code, and it promises the “ultimate evolution” of the original TS808 design, we’re ready for your shrugs of indifference.
But what if we told you that this has come fresh out of Totally Wycked Audio (TWA), and, as such, it was designed by the man who invented the Tube Screamer in the first place, the legendary Japanese electronics whiz, Susumu Tamura?
Then you’d be interested, right? And you would be right to be. Because Source Code is one serious “next-gen” TS-style drive.
It’s a Tube Screamer in all but name – the name that now belongs to Ibanez. But the design was all Tamura’s work. He developed the soft-clipping powerhouse back in 1979, originally as a rival to the venerable Boss OD-1. It yielded hot, juicy mids, a low-gain drive that worked wonders with a blues guitar rig – think that scooped profile of a Fender amp and Strat, and what that sounded like filtered through the genius of Stevie Ray Vaughan.
But over the years it has occupied a place on pedalboards for all styles of guitar, from blues and pop to metal (the Tube Screamer is a permanent fixture on Tom G. Warrior’s ‘board).
Well, this circuit has never been far from Tamura’s breadboard. Over the years, he has picked at it, pondered how it could be improved. Source Code is the result. It reimagines the Tube Screamer as a four-knob drive pedal, with dials for Bite, Level, Drive, and Tone.
The latter three are all self-explanatory and by now very familiar. Bite? That’s a particularly interesting addition to the TS format. As you turn it up it alters the “balance of odd and even-order harmonics”, which is to say that at extreme settings it goes from symmetrical to asymmetrical clipping and has the feel and saturation of a high-gain tube amp.
You can run this thing on 9V DC from a pedalboard power supply or battery, but it’ll take 18V if you’re looking for more headroom. Source Code also has some extra juice under the hood, too, with an onboard +6dB boost to hit the front end of your guitar amp hard without coloring your electric guitar tone.
Tamura has integrated a multi-transistor input buffer to the signal to preserve your signal, and there are top-mounted jacks and mechanical true bypass. At the heart of the circuit is an IC op-amp.
A quick aside on the build: that metallic green spray chop with the LEDs is… Chef’s kiss. Perfect. All of these are handmade in the USA. As such, they ain’t cheap at $299 but still, if you like Tube Screamers....
Head over to Godlyke Distribution for more details.
