SolidGoldFX Beta DLX

I plugged in the Beta DLX and it immediately gave me a pleasant sound. Then I started flipping switches and toying around with the boost. That guy in the SolidGoldFX video did a few sweet sounds:

So I copied the settings and tried them for myself. It totally worked out. This pedal does some magic to flatwound strings.

The controls seem pretty straightforward at first glance. You get basically two units in one enclosure. The Overdrive section has your standard volume/tone/gain, plus toggle switches. The first is for clipping diodes that let you choose between silicone, silicone/germanium and none. The next two will give you boost/cut/flat for mids and bass. My unit behaves a bit odd when it comes to the bass switch, which is named ‘body’ – my ears tell me the boost and cut are reversed. I seem to get more bass in the cut position.
The Boost section has a volume pot and two toggles, once again a bass boost/cut/flat one and one that lets you choose the position of the boost pre/post overdrive. The boost section can operate independently from the overdrive. The advantage of that is that you can use it as a standalone boost, the disadvantage is that you cannot set a sound that involves both the boost and overdrive and activate it with a single foot switch.

My usual approach is to find the sweet spot for every option and then roll with it, but the Beta DLX makes that kind of hard. With the gain at zero, there is still signal passing through, and the sound is somewhat altered, in a good way. You can find more than a few good tones without involving the gain, just by twisting the tone knob and by playing around with the toggle switches. With the diodes in the ‘none’ position and the gain at zero, there is no audible overdrive happening, but when you select one of the other options, you can already hear some harmonic distortions in the overtones. There are a few settings that let me think about where I could use the sound I’m getting because it felt good playing with the pedal in my chain.
With the boost set pre overdrive, the second foot switch can give you more gain on that same sound, driving the notes into more saturation. This is very smooth, though. That’s not an angry bellowing you get, but a musical singing overdriven sound that can be used in musical contexts that do not benefit from an aggressive bass sound.
You can set the gain pretty much everywhere you want and then use the other controls to make it sound good.
You can actually do that with any knob or switch on there (apart from the volume, of course).
I’ve spent two nights playing this pedal for extended periods of time and right now, I’m thinking of mounting it on a mic arm so I can have it in easy reach while I play through it. It feels like I already unearthed a score of usable sounds but still have only scratched the surface. Touch sensitivity? Check. You get heaps of that if you want to. Versatility? It’s downright overwhelming.