This results in a great pedal to really work your guitar’s volume control, taking it from a dirty boost to a tight overdrive sound. The selection of clipping diodes allow for a very even transition of the gain control from low, to high. What is it & what does it do? At it’s heart, the OD3 is what I consider a traditional overdrive, it takes your guitar signal & amplifies to the point of clipping & then clips the signal even further with it’s clipping diodes (depending on the gain setting & your playing dynamics). I learnt about stacking overdrives because of the incredible range of Boss pedals & I’m sure there would have been hundreds of thousands of others that did as well. This couldn’t have worked out better, guitarists being generally conservative, players didn’t want to let the BD2 go quietly into the night & instead looked to the OD3 as an alternative flavour to be used on it’s own or with certain guitars & amps or to add colour to other combinations of sounds. With changes to the clipping & eq stages intended as refinements, it took a step to the side & carved it’s own path rather than being simply a replacement in the product line. The RE-202 and RE-2 are available now, priced at $399.99 and $249.99 respectively.Introduction: The Boss OD3 OverDrive was introduced to the world in 1997 (interestingly 3 years after the OD3-B was released) & was initially intended to be the successor to the 1995 released BD2 Blues Driver. Users can select the delay tail behaviour when bypassing the pedal, and tap tempo is performed with the 'hold then tap' routine familiar from Boss's other delay pedals. And, impressively given its size, it's still a true stereo device. This model offers 11 modes and just three virtual tape heads (as on the original), but like the larger RE-202 you can still apply the tape delay and spring reverb effects on their own, should you wish. Next up is the RE-2, which packs its RE-201 emulation into the iconic Boss pedal format. External footswitch and expression pedal control is catered for, as is MIDI. Users can select between two behaviours when the unit is bypassed: either 'straight through', in which the input is unaffected, or with preamp emulation, where even with the unit bypassed, the signal still gets some character from the input stage. It's also a true stereo device, capable of working with both instrument- and line-level signals. Additions to the RE-201's features include a doubling of the maximum delay time, an additional delay tap, adjustable wow & flutter, and the ability to select different emulated tape 'ages', for varying degrees of repeat degradation.
The RE-202 is a three-footswitch stompbox that matches the look and feel of the real deal, including its 12-way mode selector rotary switch. Back in 2007, Roland's guitar-oriented sub-brand Boss brought out a digital recreation in the form of the RE-20 twin-pedal stompbox, and now they've done it again, with not one but two new Space Echo emulation pedals. Roland's classic RE-201 Space Echo is as popular as ever, but with prices skyrocketing they remain out of reach of most.