This is a great pre-amp. It also has nice tone controls. You can go from mild OD to balls to the wall fuzztone distortion. The tone controls allow for nice shaping.

I got this pedal because I own a SuperDrive II that I like a lot and I wanted to bring that warm Budda overdrive to some of my other gear. I have a ToneBone Classic, Reverend DriveTrain II, as well as Rocktron and POD preamps, and the Phatman has the warmest, most organic overdrive of any of them. It's great for warming up clean and semi-clean PODxt Pro patches, in effect turning each patch into a two-channel amp. It also works great with Budda amps. It wasn't as good with my Two Rock, as the distinctive Two Rock sound and the Budda overdrive don't mesh that well. I just did some test recordings with the Phatman into my POD straight into the digital out into my FireWire audio interface, and the results were MUCH more organic and pleasing than the straight POD. This pedal is big (and expensive), but in this case you get what you pay for. This is the one overdrive pedal that will always stay in my pedalboard.