TECH 21 American Woman

The American Woman is an overdrive pedal from Tech 21, designed with Randy Bachman of The Guess Who and named after the band’s 1970 hit. Bachman asked for a standalone pedal after hearing a SansAmp PSA-1 preset that matched his tone, which had been built from his ‘59 Les Paul going through amps, mics, compressors and tape. Tech 21 reworked that signal chain into a single overdrive pedal that works with any amp. The pedal reproduces the effect of running two guitar amplifiers into each other (the speaker output of one into the input of another), giving a mix of odd and even harmonics that suggests both a preamp and a power amp stage. With Drive turned down, it cleans up for warm, lightly dirty blues sounds. **Controls** Drive: Sets the amount of overdrive. The harmonic content responds to your playing dynamics. In the file names here I denoted it as G for gain. It was impossible to capture the pedal with max gain but in real life there's almost no difference between gain 8 and gain 10 (max) so you don't miss anything significant. Gate: Reduces hiss and noise when you’re not playing. Disabled in my case -> One thing about the pedal that I disliked was the fact that the gate is even active when the knob is turned all the way down. This turned out to cut the tone when playing with low settings on the guitar volume pot. I emailed Tech 21 and they kindly told me how to mod the pedal to disable the gate completely. That's why you see a toggle switch above the knobs on my pedal in the photo which allows to toggle the gate (and its control pot) on or off. Tone: Moves the high cut from about 10 kHz down to 1 kHz. Ich chose to capture the pedal with the tone knob maxed since lower values made everything just more wooly / dull / muffled. This is not a versatile pedal after all and I felt that its character is captured best when I don't cut the tone. Level: Sets the output volume. It has a lot of range, up to about 10 dB of boost.