Crooked Axis

OVERDRIVE

Crooked Axis is a simple yet super versatile, multipurpose gain device. Starting as a powerful clean booster with vintage flavoured feel and active bass & treble controls to drive any amplifier to natural break-up, it takes your tone through fat overdrive or raw, rugged, gritty distortion, into ear-melting fuzz territory and lo-fi deconstructed sounds. Its core is based on the classic Colorsound Power Boost – a discrete transistor boost/overdrive design, praised by many seeking either a powerful gain provider or just for its original sound signature. Not many pedals can smash a tube amp with such power, deep bass and glassy treble as this one. Top three knobs represent “stock” Colorsound setup, while the MASTER knob lets the original circuit be set for distorted sounds at low output volume. BASS & TREBLE knobs are arranged after the drive section, so the EQ shapes the final tone after the desired amount of drive is achieved. The RANGE knob is an extension to allow deeper voicing of the dirt character – it removes low frequencies from the drive section, making distortion tighter and smoother, and can bring it to clangy, grinding noise regions. The heart of Crooked Axis is the BLAST switch, which grants the pedal a new character and distortion range. In the BLAST-off position you get a warm, heavy overdrive with extra bass; cranked up it turns into fat, grainy distortion without sizzle. In the BLAST-on position you experience melting fuzz with blasting low-end, bursting attack and blooming textures during sustained notes. Throughout the whole range it keeps dynamics and attack sensitivity, feeling like an extension of the instrument. Together with various RANGE and EQ settings, this setup provides a huge palette of tones – from pristine clean to utter destruction, from ’70s leads to the heaviest sludge sounds on guitar, baritone or down-tuned bass. There’s also the BLAST switch’s middle position: neither fully on nor off. Across most of the DRIVE knob range it delivers saggy, loose overdrive with lower gain but an even fatter tone than BLAST-on, and at maximum DRIVE yields a brass-like, throaty fuzz with lo-fi textures and random octave-down effects. Original Colorsound Power Boost pedals were powered by two 9 V batteries; Crooked Axis requires a 9 V DC supply and uses an internal voltage-doubler circuit for 18 V operation. No battery operation is possible.