Vintage's $50 Americana Fuzz, Transparent Overdrive, Overdrive + Distortion Pedals | Review & Demo

Today we’re looking at four extremely affordable new drive pedals from Vintage Guitars: the Americana Fuzz, the Overdrive, the Transparent Overdrive, and the Distortion!

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This was a bit of a surprise, I have to admit – Vintage Guitars suddenly bringing out 13 new pedals in late 2025. But, if these FX (and there’s not just drives: there’s modulation pedals, a delay, a reverb, an EQ pedal, and three preamp pedals) can live up to the Vintage philosophy of providing great quality performance at a budget price point, then I’m all for it!

Me being me, I couldn’t fit all 13 pedals into one video, so here we’re looking at the four standard drives (check my channel for videos on the other pedals!).

First up is the Americana Fuzz, which is clearly some variation on the iconic EHX Big Muff circuit. With its Level, Tone and Fuzz controls, this will be a simple one to dial in if you want to bring that wall of noise and endless sustain beloved by everyone from Jimi Hendrix and Jack White to Dave Gilmour and Smashing Pumpkins. Resplendent in an American flag-esque color scheme, and coming in at a mere £49.99, the Americana Fuzz is definitely the most eye-catching of the bunch here.

Next up is the rather imaginatively named… Overdrive. Vintage haven’t exactly gone to town with the names of these pedals, but hey – let’s let the tones do the talking anyway! The Overdrive is precisely that, but Vintage also say that this £44.99 option is going to be great as an always-on boost, or even as an EQ sculptor for your tone. That leads me to think this could be a transparent overdrive in the vein of the legendary Paul Cochrane Timmy, especially as we have the same four controls here: Volume, Gain, Treble and Bass. That said, it's also green, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it did the Tube Screamer thing either! Ah well, time to find out!

Then we come to the Transparent Overdrive, and I think we can all guess what Vintage are going for here. This pedal only has the three knobs – for Volume, Tone, and Gain – but it costs an eye watering £54.99, which makes it the most expensive of the four in today’s test.

Finally, we have the Distortion. Yes, it’s a high gain distortion pedal. Here, we have the luxury of two footswitches – the standard On/Off, and a Boost switch – alongside six controls: Tone, Mid, Bass, Volume, Distortion, and Boost. This could help make the £49.99 Distortion the most versatile of today’s choices, with plenty of tone sculpting options on offer.

So, four distinct flavors of drive here – but which one is best? And are these Vintage pedals a new leader in affordable stompboxes? Time to find out! In this video, I put the four of them through their paces in a variety of musical styles to see how good they really are. Guitar-wise, I’m using my 2025 Ibanez AZ Standard HSS Strat type, and we’re running into the front end of my Hughes & Kettner Black Spirit 200 amp.

Enjoy, and let me know which of the pedals you like best in the comments!

Here are some links to the various playing samples and info bits:

00:00 Intro and what we’re doing today
01:19 Today’s rig
01:38 Americana Fuzz info
02:58 Americana Fuzz tones
07:21 Americana Fuzz: how good is it?
08:23 Overdrive info
09:34 Overdrive tones
14:12 Overdrive: how good is it?
15:35 Transparent Overdrive info
16:11 Transparent Overdrive tones
21:01 Transparent Overdrive: how good is it?
23:04 Distortion info
23:54 Distortion tones
28:09 Distortion Boost knob test
29:05 Distortion: how good is it?
31:23 Which pedal is best, and my conclusions

My setup was as follows: I ran the pedals into the front end of my Hughes & Kettner Black Spirit 200 amp. I went from the amp’s Red Box DI straight into my Focusrite Scarlett 2i4, which went into Logic Pro X. That’s it. No post-processing on the sounds was done. Here’s some links to those bits of gear:

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At Thomann: https://thmn.to/thocf/jkhog8l06m
At Sweetwater: https://sweetwater.sjv.io/LXqdE0
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Backing music from the YouTube Audio Library: Duck In The Alley – TrackTribe.

#Vintage #VintageGuitars #VintageEffects #VintageTone #JHS #JohnHornbySkewes #OverdrivePedal #OverdrivePedals #FuzzPedal #TransparentOverdrive #BigMuff #IbanezAZ #RichWordsMusic #GuitarGear

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