GEAR SPOTLIGHT
MAD
PROFESSOR
BIG TWEEDY
DRIVE
REVIEW BY SAM HILL
STREET PRICE $195.95
Vintage Fender tweed
amplifiers are awesome.
They are extremely
dynamic and touch
sensitive. Play with a
light hand and you are
rewarded with rich, thick
clean tones. Dig in, and
you’ve got some of the
best sounding breakup
around. It’s no wonder
the original Marshall
amplifiers were inspired
by the tweed Bassman.
If you’ve ever played
through a real deal tweed
Fender, you know just
how good they can be.
They’re also very
expensive. While you
may not have to shell
48
GEAR SPOTLIGHT //
out Dumble money for
one, it isn’t practical for
most musicians to spend
several thousand dollars
on a piece of Holy Grail
gear. Lucky for you, the
sound scientists at Mad
Professor have created
the Big Tweedy Drive.
Based on the Fender
high-power tweed Twin,
the Big Tweedy Drive
aims to provide big tweed
tone in a user-friendly
stompbox format.
The pedal is very
straightforward in its
design, with Volume,
Tone, Drive, and Presence
controls. There’s no
learning curve here—just
Mad Professor Big Tweedy Drive
set it how you like it and
go. The Presence control
serves as the final word
in tone shaping, allowing
you have fierce, bright
tones or smoky mellow
warmth depending where
you set it.
The BTD is very true
to the original Fender
design, and as such, it
is not a high-gain pedal.
Rather, it provides touch
sensitive grind and
grit that blooms into
harmonic overtones at
higher volumes. You can,
however, coax some mean
tones out of it when
used in conjunction with
a distorted amplifier or