Rick Matthews' The Broker Duality Overdrive Combines Classic TS808 and Blues Breaker Flavours

Rick’s new dual-drive pedal follows a well-trodden path not dissimilar to bigger box Analog.Man King of Tone, Keeley D&M Drive, and King Tone The Duellist pedals. Browne Amplification’s Protein is slightly different with a Nobels ODR-1 voicing in place of the typical TS808 style variant - while they all mine that same rich seam of eminently complementary overdrives.

Controls here are very straightforward - with Volume, Tone and Gain on both sides. The Black knobs always control the TS808 voicing, and the Silver knobs always control the Blues Breaker voicing. You can switch the channel order by holding down the First Channel Footswitch for 5+ Seconds - where the LED colours will flip across to indicate whether Red LED TS808 is First or Second - same for Blue LED Blues Breaker - so those pictured LED’s will simply both flip colour every time the order is changed.

You can run those channels individually or stacked in series either way. Would have been nice to have a parallel option - it’s been quite a few years since we first started seeing those on pedals like Boss’s JB-2 Angry Driver, CBA’s Brothers and Strymon’s Sunset - I really love that feature and always thought it would become more of a common trend - while nowadays it almost seems like it was a fad! More Parallel please say I!

So what we have here is a really cool stripped down version of those bigger box pedals (BB enclosure) - minus some of the frills - where they typically have some internal or external voicing switches and controls per channel. For instance the King of Tone has dip-switches that allow you to select Boost/Overdrive/Distortion voicing on each channel, as well as a Presence trim-pot per channel. The Duellist has external 3-way voicing switches per channel. etc.

The below demos sound pretty decent - this is really a very well-known quantity and Rick is a highly detail-oriented circuit engineer / designer - so he will have spent a considerable time tweaking and calibrating things to his ideal preferences.

Ticket price here is a very typical $200 and is available right now from the Matthews Effects Webstore. This is for sure a really neat take on this format - particularly with the smart order-changing function. While I would typically have liked a few extra voicing controls - just to get a little bit more out of each circuit.

Certainly a decent proposition - I’ve still to decide if I feel I need this in my collection - I’ve really added quite a lot of overdrives this year!

How about you dear readers - anyone down for one of these?