Akai Blues Overdrive Pedal

Akai Blues Overdrive Pedal

Decent Blues Overdrive

Sometimes things happen that make you scratch your head and say “WTF?”. And that is exactly what happened to me a few days ago. I had been trolling Craigslist for a few weeks looking for an interesting pedal just to mess around with and I found something: an Akai Blues Overdrive that the owner was willing to trade for a good chorus pedal. I just happened to have a Marshall Supervibe that I hadn’t used in a while so I emailed him and voila, the deed was done!

Now let me explain about the Akai: I had done a bit of research on that pedal a while back and wasn’t too impressed with the audio clips. And I also found out that it was actually a rebranded Biyang pedal. They sold for more than double what the Biyang units went for, so I didn’t really give it another thought. But this was a pedal just to goof around with and try some different mods and just generally experiment with and if it got trashed no biggie. Long story short, I got it home and plugged it in and Holy Shit! this freaking thing sounds great! When run with my Burn Unit the combination flat out smokes! With a few twists of a knob it goes deep into metal territory. That fact really doesn’t mean much to me since i don’t play metal, but it illustrates how extreme these two pedals can get when run together. By itself, the Barber Burn Unit beats it on every front. But that’s not to say the Akai doesn’t sound great in it’s own rite. In fact, it sounds like the Voodoo Lab Overdrive with just a touch more high end response. It’s very smooth through most of the drive knobs rotation until about 2 o’clock, at which point it gets grittier and crunchier but not in an over the top kind of way. NONE of those youtube videos does this thing  justice. And if it hadn’t been for the situation at the time I would never have even thought about one of these. Karma, man. Karma led me to it. Has to be, right?

The construction is pretty solid too. I’m not sure if the top half of the case is polished stainless or hard chromed, but I’ve never seen another pedal like it anywhere. I’ve had Harleys with expensive chrome jobs that were no where near this nice! (could be a negative point if stage lights ever hit it at the perfect angle cause the reflection just might flash blind you. I’m not kidding).

But just like everything else we hold dear, the tone is completely subjective to the player. What sounds like a Harley with 2″ straight pipes going flat out on an open road to me might sound like a mo-ped with bad gasoline to you. And I ain’t tellin anybody to run out and buy one of these. But If you ever get the chance to check one out you really should.

The next post will cover my other new pedal: the aforementioned Barber Burn Unit (Karma was smiling on me for that one too). As for the Akai, there will be NO experimenting with this unit, that’s for damn sure.