TECH 21 XXL

The Tech 21 XXL is an analog distortion pedal from the SansAmp makers. It is known for thick, saturated distortion that reacts strongly to your playing dynamics. The same settings can sound noticeably different depending on how hard you pick or how you set your guitar's volume pot. Warp control: The pedal’s signature control. It shifts the balance of odd and even harmonics and responds to your playing dynamics. At minimum, you get more even harmonics, which sounds like a Class A tube amp overdrive. Around 4 (or 11 o'clock), you get traditional distortion that suits chords and rhythm playing. At maximum, the sound saturates heavily and sustains. It can approach a vintage fuzz, with smoother, fatter, “singing” lead tones. The gain control (named "drive") is a little weird since it provides a relatively high gain even when set to 0. I captured three gain (drive) settings (0, 5, 8 with the pot being not linear) and four warp settings each. The pedal gets quite noisy with increased gain so I refrained from capturing max gain due to its questionable use. The tone control is flat when maxed, a low-frequency boost at the midpoint, and a high-frequency roll-off towards the lowest setting. I chose to leave it mostly dimed in order to capture the pedal with a flat tone response. There's only one capture with tone at 4 for comparison. I recommend watching Shane Theriot's video about this pedal (see below; section starts at 07:10 minutes).