On a related note, I bought a Danelectro Fab Overdrive as part of a birthday present to myself. I have a TS clone and I don't like it as much as other people and I wanted to give boosting another go. For $20, it seemed like a decent risk in case it became a brand new paper weight. It arrived yesterday and I put the Recto through its paces.
Fab settings: I had the overdrive off, tone was varied, and volume was varied between half and quarter on. If overdrive is off, the tone circuit is less useful.
As a boost, I liked it on Vintage and Raw best. The pinch harmonics were super easy and the compression felt right. The input sensitivity for Modern is too high and the power amp has less headroom than the others. It was difficult to find a balance, but increasing the mids sounded better than scooped. Decreasing the amp Gain to 10:00 - 12:00 helped Modern and Vintage from being too blunt and brightened the sound. Turning up the amp Gain was full on metal.
Power amp headroom made a huge impact on the tone. Silicon Bold worked best for me. Tube Bold still worked well, but less so. The others just didn't sound full enough and cut off the harmonics I was trying to generate or turned them dark. The amp needed room for the boost to do its job.
If I was playing Ozzy or Danzig all the time, this would work pretty well. I liked it more for soloing than for rhythm, but I'll keep working with it for awhile.
As an overdrive, it sounded really good on Clean and lower gain Raw settings. I was able to get a fuzzy sound through high gain modes by barely turning the "overdrive" up and turning the volume down.
For $20, this is a good deal. I like using Modern, so the pedal may not get a lot of use for those days. For Raw, it is incredibly useful and I'll be using it.
