FenderSmolder Acoustic Overdrive Pedal

The clips you'll find on YouTube do not do this device justice.Typically you'll encounter at least two issues using drive on acoustic guitars. Lack of clean signal blend, and also lack of amp and cabinet emulation which is critical for electric drive effects to sound good through a PA or acoustic amp. Both issues are handled perfectly without any effort and the drive sound is pleasant.You can accomplish the same thing with a decent modeler and parallel processing by having one lane use some form of drive emulation followed by amp and cab simulation and then setting the blend appropriately where the lanes meet but this is so much simpler and easier to dial in.I'm sure you could also get there with a traditional pedal chain but it would require a lot of cables, at least one LS-2, an IR loader or Sansamp style thing and it really hurts my head even thinking about it.Long story short, if you have an acoustic pedal board the Smolder should be on it.

Holy cow, I started using this and immediately felt like a rockstar. The overdrive pedal not only looks clean, sounds so good. Puts out an incredible rock electric guitar sound, and you can tone it down based on what you want it to sound like. WELL DONE!

I won’t get into the ins and outs of the pedal because the other reviews probably did that. I’ll just write about my experience.When using it, I just couldn’t get a good tone out of it and couldn’t figure out why.But the more I played with it, it finally dawned on me: It needs a clean output. See, when turning the Blend from clean to the affected tone, the acoustic tone changes too, much like how an acoustic would sound going through a traditional electric amp, and as we all know, that sounds terrible.So I ran the pedal through my parallel loop configuration and switch on the phase and bam, the acoustic came through beautifully, and now I could dial in as much Smolder as I wanted via the parallel loop pedal.In effect, I created my own “clean” channel out. And that’s what the Smolder needs... a secondary 1/4” out unaffected by any of the processing so one can mix in the amp tone without it mutating the clean acoustic signal. Maybe a phase switch on the Smolder would work, but signal paths would have to be independent I’m assuming.Anyway. It’s a great idea for a pedal, and I’m keeping it since I made it work (I use a Signal Blender if you’re interested) but if I were to only use this pedal in series, it just wouldn’t be usable to my ears.Perhaps Fender will make a version 2 with dual outs?

This pedal seems like it was rushed to market without concern for its limitations. There's a 9V battery port, but it doesn't work. There's a port to plug in a 9V cable, but it isn't included. That means someone at Fender literally tried to save $2 at manufacturing cost on a $120+ pedal.When you can get it to work, it's a good option for adding some crunchiness to your acoustic. However, it's probably best to look for another solution, or wait until the next version of the Smolder is released. Hopefully the next one will work out of the box.

Exactly what I’ve been waiting for. Finally a distortion pedal for an acoustic guitar! This adds just enough “bite” to cover rock songs in a soloist setting or accompaniment. The effect isn’t muddy: it’s added distortion with clarity. Wish I’d had this years ago. Just understand, it’s not going to make a Les Paul out of an acoustic guitar but it does “bridge the gap” for harder tunes played on acoustic: kicks it up a notch. Multiple settings allow you to achieve the sound you desire. Just spend some time with it, be patient, and really take the time to explore what this pedal is capable of.

I needed an pedal for overdriving a Martin acoustic for lead while looping chords.This did the trick, and some.First, the OD tone is great. Not metal-crunchy and not limp-wristed either. Proper bluesy grit.Second, the separate knob for feedback control is tremendous. My Martin is dual pickups - piezo and open mic. Feedback is easy with that guitar, but this pedal squashed that without squashing the tone.Lastly, the blend knob is a blessing. I can get interesting raw acoustic baseline sound with a crunch on top. Gets me the sound I want.

Awesome pedal..but I'm on my third pedal. The first one lasted a year but the over drive is burning out, bought another one right outta the box didn't work, replaced that, back to a great sounding pedal. Hope they keep making it or solved whatever killed my first one cause I love the sound it can give my acoustic .

I do acoustic gigs and occasionally use some form of overdrive/distortion for a few songs. I’ve used a number of pedals or modeling over many years. This is the first thing that is actually convincing I’ve found. Very happy with this one. It’s a large footprint on my board, but it’s worth it.