Developed in collaboration with guitarist Brian Klemm of SoCal band Suburban Legends, the Rude Tech Dude Alert! is a tube-screamer-style overdrive pedal with a fun NON-GREEN look and a few tricks up its sleeve.
Besides your expected Level, Drive, and Tone knobs, it features a Whoa!/Woah! Switch that gives you two clipping modes:
- Whoa! gives you LED clipping, with a rounder and smoother saturation
- Woah! is asymmetrical Silicon diode clipping delivering a harsher distortion with more harmonics.
However, the functionality of the “regular” knobs also differs from your regular screamer-style pedals, mostly because the Level control can deliver 10 dB of output more than a standard screamer-style circuit. Besides making the pedal louder, this also has the effect of expanding the range of overdrives in the Gain stage, making it capable of delivering distortion tones when both knobs are maxed out.
The Tone control is tuned to sound slightly bassier than a regular Tube Screamer. The pedal can run at 9v or 18v for increased headroom before the op-amp breakup occurs, and higher output volume.
We added the Dude Alert! to our comprehensive article about Tube Screamer clones and variants.
