Mooer Hustle Drive, drive micro pedal

Product Information

Heavier Modern Metal has a slightly more pronounced hint of compression, with the tightest note definition and almost a staccato percussive attack / edge. It is essentially a high gain distortion sound with bass and treble dialled all the way up and mid tones dialled all the way down - AKA Scooped Mids.

Hustle Drive_MOOER Audio

It's not that dissimilar to the Suhr Mini Riot - which is the inspiration for Mooer's Solo Distortion q. Remains the drive that is adaptable and goes from nice drive, the distortion that shipments already pate.

Particularly when run at the higher voltage, a neck single coil will really sing when given just a bit of hair by the OCD. To my mind to get the correct balance you must use proper analogue circuits at the heart of the pedal - with all the appropriate and different analogue clipping types, and old-fashioned op amps that alone can provide those somewhat randomized and fully organic dirty distortions. To me they both sound great and it's really down to the ears and dynamic feel of the individual musician. As can be discerned from looking at the schematics side-by-side, the original OCD is essentially a Voodoo Labs Overdrive, itself similar to a cascaded MXR Distortion+. I actually have little or know acquaintance with the inspiration pedal here - the Digitech Death Metal Distortion - but I absolutely love the texture of the gain on this one.

The FX files: Fulltone OCD | MusicRadar The FX files: Fulltone OCD | MusicRadar

Yet even this will have subtle variations when trying to dial in a particular known tone - based on specific component selection, circuit variations and specific configuration and deployment. The Elektron Analog Drive pedal by contrast is what the Riverside should have been - 8 separate analogue circuits which give you everything from the lightest clean boost tones, through fuzz overdrive, and onto genuinely thick metal-like distortion (but not quite BE-OD or Diezel level). Everyone's ideal frequency profile is slightly different, so it may well be that this might be your favourite OCD-type pedal, it certainly warrants consideration.

I have the MK1 Channel 3 version which is barely a few months old - a new MKII Channel 3 + 4 version was introduced at NAMM and is imminent, I will of course upgrade immediately when this happens - it’s amazing to have such relatively low-cost access to the signature Diezel sound. Like I said at the start, and how I still feel at the end of this overview - there are most definitely 4 or 5 here that I would look to add to my collection - the E-Lady, Micro Drummer, Mod Factory, Pitch Box and Soul Shiver probably foremost - but all listed are pretty great as mentioned, and I've probably overlooked a couple too - I sort of deliberately left out the discontinued Mooergan. The Movall Minotaur / Tone City Bad Horse are other supposedly great small alternatives, lots of people favour the affordable Elektro-Harmonix Soul Food, which I also have in original and JHS modded varieties.