MXR Timmy Overdrive

Paul Cochrane’s Celebrated Boutique Overdrive—Available from MXR

There’s nothing more satisfying than dialing up the perfect guitar tone, but what do you do when you want to hit it with some overdrive without chucking your hard-earned tone out the door? Famed pedal builder, Paul Cochrane, was well aware of this predicament and set about to create an overdrive that could punch up your tone while retaining its fundamental character — thus the Timmy Overdrive was born. The Timmy pedal was well-priced and highly desired, and the demand for it often outran the production. So, Paul has teamed up with MXR to bring Timmy to a wider audience. Now you can level-up your rig with Timmy’s celebrated transparent overdrive, designed to bring out the expressiveness of your playing, while giving you access to myriad tones and textures via its four control knobs (Bass, Treble, Volume, and Gain) and a Clip switch with three distinct clipping profiles to fit a range of playing styles. 

Huge, transparent tone enhances your core sound

Due to its vast tonal palette and ability to keep a guitarist’s core tone intact, the MXR Timmy Overdrive has been called a working guitar player’s dream come true. So, what gives Timmy its signature transparency and musicality? First, the Treble and Bass controls on Timmy are cut-only, which prevents you from overhyping your signal. Instead, it puts the focus on eliminating unwanted upper and lower frequencies. Second, the Bass control is wired to affect your signal before it hits the overdrive stage, so you get a cleaner, more focused low end. On the other side, the Treble control affects the signal post-overdrive, which helps you smooth out grittier tones while accentuating pleasing harmonics. Finally, Timmy’s unique three-way Clip switch lets you select from three different clipping types, moving from light saturation to massive, crunchy distortion.