Olinthus Cicada Overdrive

I love a good mini pedal, for sure, but the creation we’ve got for you today takes the concept of “tiny effects” to an entirely new level. Like something out of a late-80’s Rick Moranis movie, the Olinthus Cicada Overdrive is quite odd upon first sight, but it quickly grows on you, if for nothing else but hilarity at how small it is. However, once you plug it in, you come to find that this green beast is NOT messing around, with big, full sounds and amp-crushing drive for days and days…

The Cicada Overdrive faithfully recreates the sought-after sounds of the original Ibanez TS808 Tube Screamer and shoehorns them into the smallest effects pedal on the planet. You get a huge variety of silky smooth, complex overdriven tones. In a comically small footprint. Cicada utilizes a tried-and-true single-stage soft-clipping circuit, with filtering before and after the gain stage, resulting in a thick and tubelike overdrive sound.

The original dynamics of your signal are preserved, even as gain is increased. The circuit’s signature mid-range boost makes it an ideal choice for fattening your sound without sacrificing clarity. It’s like magic, but it’s actually science. Cicada gives you full-bodied drive sounds and luscious sustain in a package that’s nearly as small as a 9-volt battery. No matter how little space you have, there’s always room for the huge overdriven sounds of Cicada. Its small size allows it to be placed where no pedal has gone before…

Well, it looks like the “size doesn’t matter” argument has finally been proven to be true. This has got to be the smallest effects pedal ever created, right?? In our demo below, we’ll give you a taste of the tones this tiny terror is capable of producing, going through the excellent ranges in Tone and Drive. There’s a lot more info over on the Olinthus website, so be sure to head over there and check it out, and grab a Cicada Overdrive for yourself – you won’t be disappointed, we promise!!