TC Electronic EL CAMBO OVERDRIVE Classic Tube Overdrive Pedal with Intuitive 3-Knob Interface for Essential Blues Rock Tones

Well made and has a really lovely warm overdriven sound. I have 5 other overdrive pedals of different price ranges and types. Very happy with this one. Definitely brings its own unique warm tone to the party. Lots of low end growl when you turn up the drive. Yet it is surprisingly quiet with only very slight hum when at maximimum drive and output. I use it on a pedal board that goes into a di box and into laptop and studio monitors, so i dont use an amp. This pedal is now 2nd in the pedal chain and really adds that real tube sound. It works great on its own but also with the other pedals such as blues breaker, boost, delay and chorus placed after it. Being a real tube it is so responsive to how you play. Pick lightly with guitar volume rolled off and its quite clean but yet stiĺl warm sounding with good definition. Bring up the volume and/ or pick hard and it distorts beautifully. It doesnt have tone controls but I can tweak that with my eq pedal. With single coils it sounds wonderful. With humbuckers it sounds a lot heavier, more like fuzz. Its an absolutely brilliant pedal and would be worth the investment if it was 3 times the price. If you dont have a valve amp and want that warm organic drive then for 60 quid you cant go wrong with this pedal. Also there's the option to swap out the tube for another type if you should want to. I wont be changing though as love the sound of it. Its now a permanent fixture on my board for sure. No frills, just well made and sounds wonderful. Highly recommend.

I read the reviews and knew that the stock valve -- a Bugera AX7 in mine -- wasn't great. I also read that, although it is clearly a B.K. Butler Tube Driver wannabe, it didn't hit those tones. But for £60 delivered, I took a punt on it.As expected, the stock performance was pretty awful. Way too much gain under 12 o'clock and a fairly unpleasant break-up. So I did what I had planned to do all along and replaced the valve with a high quality £20 JJ Tesla 6072A/12AY7 (which has approx. half the gain of an AX7).In short, it's actually one hell of a pedal. I don't have a Tube Driver, but I was able to dial in my Helix's "Valve Driver" (Tube Driver) model to sound very close to the Tube Pilot + JJ 12AY7, so it's actually really similar. In absolute terms, set up correctly with a high headroom clean amp, there's masses of touch sensitivity and dynamics. Running the gain at half past one on the dial, and with my Strat's neck pickup into a Helix Hiwatt model or my Hamstead Artist 20, I am getting very credible Gilmour Shine On tones. At £80, it's probably the best value pedal and one of the best overdrive pedals (period) that I own.One final thing. I'm feeding it plenty of juice. It *requires* 400mA, so I fed it from a 500mA outlet from a good quality power supply. I have a sneaking suspicion that others may not have fed it enough power.I 3-starred it for versatility because it has no tone controls, but that's not a deal breaker. It's a bargain.

I don't think it's necessary to talk about the actual sounds of this pedal - Youtube reviews are out there that do a far better job of that than any amount of talk would do. But there are still plenty of good features here that make this pedal a nice and not extreme source of overdriven sounds. There's always the Dark Matter pedal from the same company if you really want to "filthy up" your guitar sound.A lot of the function of this pedal seems to be about thickening up the guitar sound, especially down at the bass end, as the "voice" switch and the bass control do a lot of add some "oomph" (an industry term) to the signal. I've found myself with the treble control set usually at 12 o'clock and the bass somewhere around the dial between there and max. This seems to work really nicely on single-coil guitars such as Strats and Teles. It just adds a bit of authority to the sound. The drive control is where all the magic is done regarding the overdrive itself (rather than the tone of that overdrive), it's really just a gain knob, but the distortion it brings in can be really nicely contoured with the tone controls - it's actually a lot of fun just to sit there playing and tweaking, because the controls all do something useful to the sound even if sometimes it's a bit subtle.The pedal is not in any way extreme. It doesn't do a single wacky "sound effect", everything it puts out can be used in a mix (some pedals - usually modulation ones - have settings you try out and then quickly shy away from; not this one).The only control left to cover is the level, which is in a sense the practical control that lets you set the overdriven level and the bypass level as you like. Some people want to hear a volume boost when overdriven because they'll be soloing in a live performance, and with a bit of tweaking here you can get that to your liking. I actually like the levels to be similar because I'm recording parts more often, and I don't like to upset the levels at the recording end by adding a dollop of boost (I can always boost levels in the mix afterwards). Being able to balance the levels gives me the ability to record at the optimal gain settings for clean and dirty sounds, and this control really gives me good control over that.What's also nice is that with the pedal being subtle if you set it up that way, it can be used as a pretty clean boost into an amplifier to help with the amp's overdriven sound, or feed in a little crunch to take the amp over the edge. The sound can get messy if taken too far, but it's nice to have a second stage of options for dialling in your ideal overdriven sound rather than just a boost pedal.The battery compartment on the back opens with a large screwhead that you can use a coin to undo, but it's central in the back plate so if you velcro the pedal to a board you'll need to leave a space if using batteries. I don't bother, instead using a One-Spot Pro power brick to supply 9v into the port on the back of the casing.Summing up, I think the pedal might be a bit subtle for some tastes, and the Dark Matter might be a more hooligan choice for those folks, but it works really nicely on my single-coil instruments, although somewhat less well on humbucker-equipped guitars, or even ones with P90s. You might also find that you need to roll off the bass response on guitars that already have a lot of of bass frequency, or limit yourself to a single pickup if you usually mix between pickups - the sound can muddy-up and require a bit of experimentation to get the best guitar/amp settings for this pedal.Given a bit of playing with settings on all parts of the chain from guitar to amp, though, you're almost guaranteed to find a really sweet sound in here that would be hard to live without.

I'll be honest, I wasn't expecting much from a pedal that cost less than £50, certainly not for an overdrive, but honestly it sounds great! The gain knob is the real gem and has usable tones in any position.I'm running it with a Vox AC15C1 (normal channel, edge of breakup) and Fender Tele, along with other pedals. It also performs well after a compressor (Wampler Ego) which some drive pedals can be funny with.If you play Rock, Blues or Country I'm 100% confident you'll find a tone in the Mojomojo that you'll gel with. Anything heavier than that and you may struggle, it's overdrive not distortion at the end of the day.So yeah, id say go for it 👍

This pedal is simple. Tone shape is all from a tube. It's my only effect or pedal in front of my Roland JC-120. It sounds perfect.This is a great pedal at an amazing price.

Si no te gusta el clean de la guitarra, este pedal puede crunchear tu sonido para rítmica y si lo empujas con un Booster o un Overdrive tubescreamer obtienes buen sonido para solos.Viene sellada la caja.El switch de activación no es tan duro, ni da un "click" que se escuche como en otros pedales.

I was pleasantly surprised when I plugged this in. I was looking for a pedal for those songs that I don’t quite want a clean tone, but don’t want nearly as much drive as my boost channel on the fly with quick, precise results for live performances (I know I could achieve that between pickup selection and trimming the volume and tone). In no time flat I was able to dial in exactly the tone I was looking for through nice tube amps. Then for kicks, I also plugged it in to a little battery powered Roland solid state amp that I have and this pedal really nicely warmed up the tone. It’s never quite going to sound and feel quite the same as a real tube amp, but this came plenty close. I strongly recommend checking this pedal out - and at $50 you really have nothing to lose and everything to gain. Only gripe is the input and output are on the top rather than the sides, but at this price point I might grab another one to dial up another variation of tone. It’s that good.

If you're looking for a high gain distortion pedal this is not it. if you're looking for an edge of breakup type drive pedal this probably isn't it either. But what this does is a mid-gain rich blues or classic rock tone perfectly and you can push it with a ts9 or mojo mojo or something like that and get real tight nice heavy rich distortion from it. it is a great great pedal with true tube tone. In my opinion, for the money, it's probably one of the best dirt pedals you can buy. If it wasn't a ''budget'' pedal people would probably hail it as iconic.

I quite loved this pedal. The sound is very sensitive (string touch), very open, retaining of (almost all) low-end, and really smoothly ramped up in distortion with the drive knob. Physically it is very well made, though a bit excessively sized and heavy. The knobs and pots and footswitch felt of medium quality, definitely better than the cheapo pedals I've used but clearly not as nice components as the expensive pedals (2-4x cost). To my ears, the drive adds an undertone of full-spectrum fuzz, which gradually becomes an overtone. With the drive cranked, its really really fuzzy. Not like the hyper mutated kind of proper fuzz boxes, but the clipping feels fine (not course) and consistently applied across the EQ. (Super super different from tubescreemers, which I personally find to be some of the most nuanced drive types around; another unpopular opinion in 2024 ha). It has a lot of string clarity in lower drive settings. The tone knob seemed to mostly just roll off the highs, not really changing the character of the sound much. With the tone knob nearly all the way up, this pedal has less impact on my guitar EQ than other drive pedals I own. Many people call this "transparent", which I personally feel is a fair term to use, though totally overrated also. I do value EQ-transparency (or non-alteration), but EQ changes can also be really good and either way can (should? are??) be revised again by your preamp or EQ pedal. The Cinders is awesome to play and great value for the cost. I enjoyed it in low gain, medium, and its higher gain settings. Its not a super versatile sound; in lower settings it can help to "open up" other pedals downstream, but not without a bit of fuzzy goodness. The bluesbreaker by comparison has much less clipping by itself and a better team player in my experience. BTW, if you dont have an EQ pedal you're crazy ;)