This EarthQuaker Devices Special Cranker Overdrive Pedal is designed to give your signal some extra grit and boost without drastically altering your tone, while retaining all the natural nuances and character of your amp.

It is designed to emulate the sound of an additional preamp tube in your amplifier to give you more saturation. Single notes on your guitar will blossom and bloom with rich harmonics and singing sustain, with responsive tube like sag. Power chords will sound thicker, crunchier and a little more ragged around the edges. Since it is designed to preserve your tone’s integrity without muddying up the low end or smearing the midrange, complex chords will remain distinct. The Special Cranker now gives you the ability to select clipping options, boasting both hot Germanium and asymmetrical Silicone diodes. When the Germanium diodes are selected, the Special Cranker delivers a softer, more rounded response with tamed highs and lower output, while the Silicon diodes add a brighter, more modern edge and higher output. Both are exceptionally responsive to playing dynamics and have excellent clarity. With a single mode switch and three cool looking chicken head control knobs, the settings are simple and quick to tweak, right at your feet.

The Level knob controls your output volume, with a unity gain between 10 to 12 o’clock depending on which diodes are selected. The mode switch acts as a diode selector, with Germanium on the left for a softer and more transparent tone, and Silicon on the right for a brighter and more modern edge. The aptly labelled More knob adjusts the amount of the effect introduced (gain). The gain characteristics of the delivered effect are dependent on which diodes are chosen. As this changes the bias of the transistor dynamically, you may hear a little noise when adjusting. It will take you from nearly clean to a medium gain overdrive when at maximum and can achieve explosive overbiased tones depending on the output of your pickups. A single Tone knob rolls off or boosts the highs, with a flat response at around three o’clock.

A top mounted in/out design helps you keep a compact pedalboard layout. It also features Flexi-Switch Technology, which is a relay based, true bypass switching style allowing you to simultaneously use momentary and latching style switching:

• Standard latching operation, tap the footswitch once to activate the effect and then tap again to bypass.
• Momentary operation, hold the footswitch down for as long as you’d like to use the effect. Once you release the switch the effect will be bypassed, giving you the ability to add a plume of tone for as long as you hold your foot down. This adds a level of interaction between yourself and the pedal not offered by classic overdrives. Please note, the switching is relay based so it requires power to pass signal.

Hand made in the USA, the EarthQuaker Devices Special Cranker Pedal will give you tweakable overdriven tone and boost without sacrificing the response of your guitar amp.

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