Paul Cochrane Timmy vs MXR Timmy vs Caline Pure Sky vs Danelectro Cool Cat Transparent Overdrive!

The Timmy pedal is the most famous of the transparent overdrives that have taken the guitar world by storm in recent years. And for good reason: it’s one of those pedals that seems to always improve your guitar tone when on, by adding a little bit of secret tonal sauce to whatever you’d had dialed in previously. Best of all, it does this without radically altering the base tones of your guitar and amp – hence the ‘transparent overdrive’ part!

But it’s also famously hard to get: Paul Cochrane builds them at his own pace, and most are snapped up in the USA the second they’re available for purchase. Oh, and Cochrane doesn’t have his own website, either, so new batches appear periodically at dealers, seemingly at random. This makes it super hard for people in the rest of the world to find one, and prices on used sites are often incredibly high.

But the demand for Timmy pedals seems to be never-ending, and so other companies have also got in on the Timmy action. Today, we’re taking a short look at four of them: the Paul Cochrane Timmy itself (mine’s the V2 version), the MXR Timmy – which was officially a collab between Cochrane and MXR – and two others, which most people would call clones: the Caline Pure Sky and the Danelectro Cool Cat Transparent Overdrive V2.

You can get the MXR Timmy here: https://bit.ly/MXRTimmyPedalRWM

But that’s about it. Getting the Paul Cochrane Timmy is much harder, as I’ve said – you’ll need to either find one used, or try searching for the few dealers in the USA that seem to occasionally list them! The Caline Pure Sky is readily available on Amazon (just search for it), and the Danelectro isn’t built any more… so you’ll need to scour the internet or used gear stores for that one too!

Anyway, this video is just about hearing the four pedals together, and seeing how close I can make them sound over a short indie rock loop. In future, I’ll be doing way more in-depth Timmy stuff, so stick around for that, and if there’s any other Timmy-esque pedals you’d like to see me try, then let me know!


Here are some links to the various parts of the video:

00:00 Hello!
02:45 Loop with the four Timmy pedals
07:09 My thoughts and why I love my Timmy so much
07:57 MXR Timmy
08:47 Caline Pure Sky
10:23 Danelectro Cool Cat Transparent Overdrive V2
12:11 Final conclusion and goodbye


My setup was as follows: I ran the pedals into my Hughes & Kettner Black Spirit 200 head. The amp went from the 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. Oh, and I used my TC Electronic Ditto Looper to play the loop.

Here’s some links to those bits of gear:

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H&K Black Spirit 200 head: https://bit.ly/HKBS200rwm
TC Electronic Ditto Looper: https://bit.ly/TCDittoRWM
Focusrite 4i4 (this is the newer equivalent of my 2i4, which they don’t make any more!): http://bit.ly/rwmFR4i4
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Enjoy!


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Backing music from the YouTube Audio Library: Duck In The Alley – TrackTribe.

#TimmyPedal #TransparentOverdrive #MXRTimmy #Danelectro #CalinePedals #Timmy #Caline


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