Electro Harmonix Germanium 4 Big Muff

     This pedal receives a more bang for the buck award for combing two separate pedals in one, an overdrive and a distortion, with the option of stacking both sides at once.   It uses two Germanium transistors in each side, hence the Germanium 4 in it's name.
     The first side in the chain is the distortion, with knobs for gain, bias, volts, and volume.   The bias knob goes from compressed and squishy counter-clockwise to having more attack and a sharper sound clockwise.   The volts knobs controls how much voltage the circuit gets and can be decreased for a starving battery effect.   The volts knob is highly interactive with the bias knob.   With both of them, you can get low-fi tones, stuttery gated tones, open ringing overdrives, all the way up to more modern high gain distortion and everything in-between.
     The overdrive side has knobs for gain, bias, tone, and volume.   This side has a warm, low gain overdrive.   Even with the gain knob and bias knob maxed, it doesn't have alot of gain.   The bias knob offers a decent amount of gain shaping range and the tone knob is functional enough.   I wish it had more range on the gain knob, but it's a minor complaint.
     With both sides on the tonal options increase and you can further modify the overall sound substantially.   This pedal offers a wide range of options and has fairly complex tones for a pedal in it's price range.