Customer Comments

You have an excellent product here. The G-TOD is an excellent test bed for rolling tubes. It lets the characteristic sound of each tube shine through.

Chris, PA

Awesome pedals!!! Solid build, great quality enclosure, knobs and switches. Build to order option is awesome! Sound is damn near perfect (B-Pro)!

Dan, CA

I received my G-TOD two days ago, I tested it last night in a gig in a Pub in my town….It sounds so well! And it works perfect with the others pedals, no noise, only pure valve distortion! Now my guitar sings! It’s amazing! I love it!!!!!!!!!!!!

Thanks again!

Marco, Italy

At stage volume, the pedal (G-TOD) really sounds like an amp channel, and is very inspiring to play through. I tried the recording output into my DAW and without any EQing the tone is very usable, in fact I’ll be recording this weekend using the direct out on a few tracks.

Sasha, IL

Thanks for making my #1 pedal (G-TOD), I didn’t know I needed it so bad! Very, very useful range of sounds and a tone control that works!

Scott, WA

I got it [G-TOD] today and it sounds absolutely fantastic. This one is going to my pedalboard right away!

Alvaro, FL

I did indeed get the [G-Drive] pedal and it really sounds great, tonally neutral but nice and organic with a creamy breakup, and as you said, it is quiet. An extremely useful tool with my Carr Rambler and Genz Benz Black Pearl. It works great both low gain and mid gain tubes. In a way—with tube swaps its like 4 different pedals—very versatile. Hard to imagine anything working better.

Jonathan, WA

SWELL Pedals Are Awesome!

Thomas, AL

I got a great ballsy sound on Drive 1 and Drive 2 with the gain about halfway up was a great classic Geddy Lee nasty tone. The B-Pro has great clarity and does not dissolve into woofiness. I totally love it!

Steve, AL

My G-Drive has just the tone I’ve been searching for! Thanks for keeping craftsmanship alive.

Chris, WI

Just wanted to drop you a line to say I LOVE THE G-TOD! After a 10 day tour and a stop at SXSW the pedal preformed flawlessly! Awesome tone and sweet sustain for days. Lots of “extra” tones by rolling back the volume knob.

Ben, CO

KUDOS on the design of this pedal! It is exactly what I was looking for. I’ve been playing guitar for around 25 years and have yet to hear a pedal that does overdrive/distortion as well as the G-TOD.

Mark, MN

The Box Rocks!!! I love the transparency, the low end, the drive…all cool.

Dave, IL

TONE …TONE …TONE! The G-TOD is one amazing animal. It sounds way sweet. Cops “Funk 49″ to a “T”.

Greg, TN

Just keep doing what you’re doing…you’re doing it right!

Richard, CA

Firstly it is so quiet you forget it is on and secondly you can turn the guitar vol right down and still have great clean vibrant tone……….wonderful. I just left it switched on all the time and used the vol pot. The amp sounds louder, less compressed and in general much bigger. I have used my fender rivera concert last two gigs and the sound was enormous…

Shea, UK

The G-TOD is everything I thought and more. Still switching around on different amps with different tubes. Each amp has its own sweet spot with the G-TOD.

Mark, CA

I tried it with my Mesa Boogie Maverick, and I think I saw God.

David, TX

As far as note definition this pedal is the king. Here’s the coolest part…this thing cleans up beautifully with rolling back the guitar volume. Not a hint of hair. I do not know of any other pedal that does this.

Dan, TN

I FINALLY found something that doesn’t color the tone of my guitars and amp.

Bill, CT

The first gig I used it with my Strat I had guys coming up to me asking how I was getting my tone!

Danni, TN

Blues tones to full throttle Marshall overdrive—it’s got it all.

Chris, CA

I absolutely love this pedal!

Frank, MA

This is the first pedal that allows the true tone of my guitars to shine through.

Jim, FL

Hey Mike…I think I have found the PERFECT PARTNER for the G-drive… A Dallas Rangemaster (Treble boost). There are countless clones and they should all work fine (just make sure it has the original OC44 transistor). I’m using a Keeley Java Boost put in line just before the G-Drive…. On the treble boost, I turn the gain up to at least half way (be sure the tone knob is all the way up—like the original!). On the G-DRIVE use “Drive 1” and turn the drive knob to around 11 o’clock……mmmm….words just don’t describe! Seriously! It’s the best pure distortion sound I have ever discovered. (Think: Clapton and Hendrix had a baby that grew up and had a baby with Stevie Ray Vaughn… and that baby had a baby with The Edge and then his mother remarried so the child was raised by Jimmy Page. If that child were to loose his mother in a freak accident at a Peavey solid-state amp factory then this sound would be the anger that child felt… or something like that). Anyway… thanks for making such great sounding pedals! I’m hoping to get my hands on your EQ sometime soon.

Chris, TN

This is the real deal! Finally a product with a real tube running at high voltage, the right EQ, incredible transparency, and as quiet as can reasonably be expected (and it is quiet enough to use direct in the studio). Not only that, but it has two entirely usable ranges of switchable gain; and there’s more…you can substitute different tubes until you find what you’re looking for in a gain range you like. You can try spending more money but you can’t find anything that comes close to this tone in a small box for less money…and it’s guaranteed for 10 years!

Like most guitar players my first quest for tone ended at the usual Gibson Les Paul (Custom in my case) and a Marshall amplifier; it worked so well there was no doubt. I had to both of those items to attend GIT and haven’t found perfect replacements since returning, more recently, to playing rock-n-roll. In between there and now my style, guitars, and amplifier choices have been numerous. While I was at GIT my instrument of choice was a Gibson ES-347; a great guitar, but the coil-taps sounded brittle to me especially after hearing ’54 and ’57 Stratocasters while in L.A. I did purchase a Strat after returning to my home state and had EMGs installed in it to keep it studio quiet and it worked for what I was doing at the time, but it’s gone now too. I have had, and still continue to collect, as my budget allows, numerous high quality guitars as my tastes continue to be refined. For the most part I now play a couple of Tom Anderson guitars for live and stage use due to their combination of all things good related to playing music on the guitar: Tone, playability, versatility, etc. Now, granted, for certain sounds a Les Paul, a Strat, or Tele cover it better, and I still grab them if needed, but for live use where numerous sounds and styles need to be covered I haven’t found better. I still have a Custom Shop Strat, a Les Paul, a Custom Shop ES-336, three different Hamers (Strat, Les Paul, & Jr. style), a Heritage ES-576 (think ES-175 with a stop-tail), a Terry Mac, a Swee-tone series Jackson (underrated), and several acoustics including a Taylor 800 series jumbo and an old Martin D-35. I have four Tom Andersons, two of which are the above mentioned, and two, while just as fine, get less play. My amplifiers are: A Mesa Boogie Tremoverb, a Heartbreaker (hey…Prince uses one), a ’73 Marshall Super Lead, and a Matchless Clubman. Now, the Heartbreaker gets used in a praise band at church with volume constraints, so it gets played clean, but the other three are rock and blues instruments and that is what they do. Enough about the gear lets’ talk tone…

My quest for tone has always been for the clarity of notes in a drive situation and I absolutely prefer to just turn the amp up and have my way with it, but the reality of today is a volume restriction unless you can play on the biggest of stages (even then, in certain situations, the soundman will give you the what-for). So in the real world I have been forced to look for what-ever gain/distortion devices I can find to come up with what sounds and feels as close to the “real thing” (guitar/amp at volume) as possible. When I started playing, like everyone else, I was playing a distortion box; a Big Muff Pi into a Sears Silvertone with 6 x 10” speakers and I was happy with that…for a short time. I moved on to a Music-Man HD130 and a Lab series L5 and then back to the Music-Man. The Marshall with an MXR micro-amp was killer…and killer loud too; when I stepped on the booster you could hear that “rush of air” sound. It didn’t matter with the band playing, but it was a different story when you stopped playing. Now, in the age of digital, you could be castrated for having so much noise on-stage. Maybe that’s harsh, but I guarantee everyone would be looking at you at the end of the song with “that look” on their faces. That’s why so many of the high-gain acts use gates on their stuff now to control the noise. After getting back into rock-n-roll I continue using the amps mentioned, using the master volumes to keep the volume down somewhat without getting the “master volume buzz” that everyone finds so annoying, and I’ve tried using numerous overdrive/boost boxes to add the extra punch you need at that lower volume. The best finds in recent memory were the Fulltone Full-Drive, then the Burris Boostiest, then the Fulltone OCD (which I used along with the Boostiest>>>still a good combination), but now comes Swell’s G-TOD: Clearly the closest thing to putting a real tube amp in front of a real tube amp that I’ve found. All the adjectives in the first paragraph apply…go back and read it again; if it reads like an advertisement I apologize, but I wrote it like I heard it and I’ve heard plenty. But just so you don’t get the wrong idea, my ideal tone is like the classic amps I remember and not the buzzy, cut your head off, chain-saw massacre type of tone I hear a lot of when I walk into a GC these days. The real deal amplifiers, with an open, transparent, and almost liquid gain, are what I appreciate the most. And to me this pedal has a sound similar to a Boogie Mark or a Marshall Plexi when they’re opened up, smoother and a little darker than most modern amplifiers made today, but with an option of drives that range from Stevie Ray and Billy Gibbons to Steve Lukather and Neil Schon. If you want something that will turn your great tube amp into a three channel version of the same thing with high gain then this is your tool. I’m not sure I need to say anything else.

David, OH