ODR-Mini Overdrive Pedal, Green

The Nobels ODR-1 is kind of a famous legendary overdrive pedal in the same way as the Tube Screamer or Klon is.This pedal is a must have for anyone who plays Blues, Country, or Southern / slightly gritty Rock.I am a believer that almost every type of pedal can play a specific role, but some like the ODR-1 are so versatile in comparison to others.With the variety of sounds this ODR-1 pedal can produce, this is kind of a "Swiss army knife" Overdrive pedal.I love that it can serve as a nearly transparent boost for your amp or solos. If you just want to bring out a little bit of a pushed sound with some break up you can turn the drive all the way off and just boost the level knob to your liking. This just boosts your current sound and is perfect for a country, chicken pickin', or bluesy setup. It is great for pushing the clean channel on a tube amp a little.If you run a compressor first into this with the compression up a bit it can get you a really great squawky sound which I love as part of a classic country sound setup.The "spectrum" dial can be turned up to boost the lows and highs, or kept at noon for an even sound with a little more midrange and there is even a hidden dial in the battery compartment to cut the bass back a little.As you bring the drive up you can get a whole range of sounds from a super clean overdrive to a more gritty sound. I just think it emits a really pleasing vintage type sound.This works great for almost any kind of pickups. You can use it with single coils to get a really good crisp sound or cut back the bass a little for humbuckers. You can just explore the different settings on the pedal and hear certain sounds that remind you of a lot of different music and genres throughout history.I think this pedal really shines as a key piece of your pedalboard setup for classic country, western swing, southern rock, rockabilly or modern country sound.It really is a worthwhile purchase and completely worth the asking price. This can easily become one of those few "always on" type of pedals on your pedalboard.

I have been looking for an OD pedal to stack with my BD2 Blues Driver on the pedal board. I replaced the Soul Food pedal which I couldn’t find my sound with. I play country / Americana / rock music professionally with a Telecaster thinline mainly. My dirty tone generally is warm overdrive preceded by a Keely compressor always on followed by analog delay.I placed the OD Mini after the BD2 and all I can say is I LOVE THIS LIL PEDAL!!! The OD Mini can growl BIGTIME for rock or it can put out a really sweet warm drive tone. When I pair the two pedals together for swampy slide the combo is superb! The spectrum knob is hard to explain but it suffices to say it’s magical and it isn’t just a tone knob. This would be an amazing pedal for three times the price. Gritty / swampy & smoothTele thinline with vintage overwound single coil pickups.I highly recommend it!

Kewl!

The Nobels ODR Mini is a new product released in the Fall of 2018, but it's essentially a mini-pedal version of the Nobels ODR-1, which is a bit of "cult classic" overdrive pedal out of Germany. I am the first to review here, so I will give a full review, but suffice it to say that from a "tone" perspective, reviews and comments pertaining to the ODR-1 are going to be very applicable to the ODR Mini, as well.BUILD QUALITYOver the past 5-10 years, there has been an undeniable trend towards taking classic pedal designs, and re-housing them in "micro" cases - either a Hammond 1590A enclosure, or something comparable. The ODR Mini is exactly that - it's marketed as bite-sized ODR-1 in a smaller, lighter enclosure, and listing for $20 less.However, it should be noted that the larger ODR-1 had top-mounted input/output jacks, whereas the ODR Mini uses side-mounted jacks. So, the smaller size of the ODR Mini might translate to more room on your pedalboard, or it might not, depending on layout and the types of cable used.The enclosure is solid, but I am deducting one star in large part because I think Nobels could have done slightly better than this for an $80 Chinese-made micro pedal. The bypass switch is the hard click (MXR) style, and it's mostly fine. The jacks were tightly mounted, and there's at least a little bit of bracing for the 9V-18V power jack (as opposed to just hanging off the PCB). But the pots for the three knobs could have been a little firmer, and the overall package didn't feel quite as nice as many other micro pedals in this price range, including Mooer and Tone City. Bonus points awarded for the easy-to-view knob caps with pointer extensions and "glow in the dark" marker labels.TONE:A lot of people discuss the ODR-1 as a "Tubescreamer alternative" because it is a decades-old green overdrive pedal, but it really is quite different from a Tubescreamer. The Spectrum knob is not a traditional tone control, but it definitely impacts the character and darkness/brightness of tone. Nobels claims that lower settings give you a mids-forward blues tone, while higher settings increase both low mids and treble for a hard rock sound. However, I found those descriptions a bit over-simplistic. From 7:00 to 10:00, the Spectrum settings are mostly blanketed and unusable. You can compensate for this by turning the gain down and volume way up for a Clapton/"woman tone" sort of thing. From 10:00 to 1:00, you get a relatively flat EQ overdrive that Nobels describes as "natural", but I would not describe as fully "transparent". The settings from 1:00 to 4:00 are brighter and more expressive, but they work best to compensate for higher gain settings and prevent things from becoming overly muddy.None of the settings I heard directly reminded me of a mids-forward Tubescreamer. On low Spectrum settings, the pedal reminded me of the TC Electronic MojoMojo, a pedal I didn't like because it was too dark and snuffed out all expressiveness. But set up properly, I got tones that reminded me of a D-style overdrive (like the Wampler Euphoria) or the driven settings of a Fulltone OCD. Not saying it matches up fully to those pedals, but those were some familiar examples that came to mind for purposes of comparison.The distinguishing feature of the ODR Mini, as with the ODR-1, is going to be the prominent low end. My favorite aspect of the pedal, however, is how that low end translates across a wide range of different gain settings. You can set the gain to almost zero and get a nice thick, crunchy blues sound. But it also has enough drive on tap to pull off driven power chords, even with something like a Telecaster bridge pickup that may be too bright/thin with other pedals. I do not know that I would recommend this pedal for boosting leads, but I would run something else into it for that purpose, and I really like the full-sounding tone and gain structure of the ODR Mini by itself. A lot of people online compared these pedals to the BOSS OD-3, which is one of my favorite underrated pedals of all time. I feel like the OD-3 has slightly more mids and a more traditional tone control, so that might be another one to check out if the idea of the ODR Mini appeals to you.DIFFERENCES BETWEEN ODR MINI & ODR-1?As I stated above, the difference between these two are pretty minor, and are largely based on price and cosmetics. However, there was one oft-noted flaw with the ODR-1 that might have played a role in the decision to release the ODR Mini. The ODR-1 was a buffered bypass pedal, but it was reportedly a poor buffer, and actually resulted in removing a lot of the bite and character of the guitar signal, even while bypassed. (Note: I have not played an ODR-1, so this is simply me reporting back the complaints of others). The ODR Mini, however, is true bypass, so it should not and does not appear to affect the bypassed tone.Since buffering is a variable that affects tone, Nobels acknowledged that they had to engineer the ODR Mini slightly differently. They claim that it has slightly less low end, or perhaps a tighter low end. Comparison videos online show some minor differences at different settings, but to my ears, the two look virtually identical, and reasonable minds can differ on whether a slightly tighter low end is actually a good thing for this already bassy overdrive pedal.

Good bang for the buck! Seams to be all plastic but the sound is really good. I’m no expert but if you put the level on about 2:30 and the drive at 11:00, and the spectrum knob at 1-2…you’re good. Just started messin around with this plastic beast. Worth $100 for sure.

This mini version of the Noble ODR provides the user with the tone that made the ODR famous, but fits within your pedal board. The unit has offset inputs and outputs, which aid in placing them side-by-side. The foot switch has a solid feel. Tone wise it provides the distinctive ODR distortion and feel that the ODR, and reacts to both guitar volume knob position, as well as the amount of attack the player picks strings. This mini is not an ODR, but it is definitely a good alternative when space and cost is a factor. I decided to keep this one because with paired with a normal ODR. It adds another spectrum of tonal capabilities, which are very musical.