TC Electronic Zeus Drive | Is this the best Klon-type pedal for under $70/€70? Review & Demo

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This is the TC Electronic Zeus Drive pedal – an extremely tiny and remarkably affordable take on the iconic Klon Centaur overdrive circuit!

Get the Zeus Drive here:

You’ll all know the Klon Centaur. Built in small numbers in the USA, it’s become a thing of legend among guitar players (John Mayer chief among them) after certain sounds, with coveted originals selling for over $5000 (yes, you read that right!) online.

For that money, you could buy more than 80 Zeus drives, should you so wish. Or a Zeus drive, a great guitar and a great amp. Or many other pretty expensive things. The point is, the Klon sound is one that is very much in demand by guitar players across the globe, and that’s why so many companies make their own take on the circuit. These days, they’re known as Klon Clones, or Klones, and the Zeus is one of the smallest and most affordable of these that I’ve seen to date.

The Zeus is about the same height as a standard mini pedal, and a little fatter. It also has top mounted jacks, so it’s primed to squeeze into small spots on pedalboards with ease. The pedal itself has the standard Klon controls you’d expect, plus a couple more options: you have Drive, Volume and Treble controls, plus a FAT switch that you can activate to give you a thicker, fatter low end boost. Meanwhile, under the Zeus’s golden hood, there’s a switch that lets you move between true and buffered bypass modes.

So the Zeus has all the ingredients to do that Klon thing, then – sparkly clean boosts, transparent overdrive, low and medium gain drive sounds, and harder clipping when the Drive knob is dimed. It also does that Klon thing of blending your clean signal with the drive from the pedal, which is something you’ll either love… or won’t. It’s something every player needs to try for themselves.

In this video, I put the Zeus through its paces in as many different musical genres as I can, from pop and blues to indie, classic rock, punk, alternative rock, metal, and more. Using my Fender Telecaster for single coil tones, and my humbucker-equipped Epiphone Les Paul, I also try the pedal into a dirty amp, and at the end I do a couple of loops with the pedal to test the extremes with the settings.

Finally, I have a little bonus loop for you where I run the Zeus up against my Electro-Harmonix Soul Food pedal – which is another well-known and relatively affordable Klon clone – to see how similar they sound.

This is the Soul Food:

Here are some links to the various playing samples and info bits:

00:00 Hello!
00:12 Introduction to the TC Electronic Zeus Drive
00:58 Pedal controls and features
03:00 Today’s rig and plan

04:09 Clean reference tones and turning on the Zeus
04:43 Pushed clean sounds
07:11 Indie rock sounds
09:29 Classic rock sounds
10:47 Hard rock sounds
11:21 Modern rock sounds
12:02 Punk rock sounds
13:38 Progressive rock sounds
14:34 Metal sounds
15:32 Zeus into an overdriven amp

17:31 Fender Telecaster indie rock loop
20:20 Epiphone Les Paul classic rock loop
23:14 Zeus vs EHX Soul Food loop

25:47 My thoughts
26:31 What I like: sounds
28:33 Price, build quality, size, top mounted jacks, bypass options
29:45 What I don’t like
30:34 My conclusions on the Zeus and why you should buy it
31:33 Thanks and goodbye

My setup was as follows: I ran the Zeus straight into my Hughes & Kettner Black Spirit 200 head. That went from the amp’s Red Box DI straight into my Focusrite Scarlett 2i4, which went into Logic Pro X. That's it. No post-processing on the sounds was done. Oh, and I used my Boss RC-10R to play the loops.

Here’s some links to those bits of gear:

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H&K Black Spirit 200 head:
Boss RC-10R Rhythm Loop Station:
Focusrite 4i4 (this is the newer equivalent of my 2i4, which they don’t make any more!):
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Enjoy!



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Backing music from the YouTube Audio Library: Duck In The Alley – Track Tribe.

#TCElectronic #OverdrivePedals #OverdrivePedal #ZeusOverdrive #KlonCentaur #KlonClone #ElectroHarmonix #EHXPedals


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@tcelectronic