The 8 Best Distortion Pedals You Can Find From $20 to $100

MXR M75 Super Badass

The MXR Super Badass Distortion, commonly advertised as a distortion pedal, when it’s actually much more than that.

This ready-to-road true bypass pedal has a simple set of controls: the Output knob for controlling the volume, the Distortion knob to set the amount of gain and a 3 band equalizer.

If you want to play around with bluesy tones as well as with high-gain distortions with a single box, this is your go-to pedal.

Extremely Versatile Drive

The core of this pedal is its highly responsive Distortion knob, with a wide range of saturation that can go from clean gritty boost, up to a metal distortion and all the tones you can imagine between those extremes.

• Clean boost: set the Distortion control all the way down to get a kind of Plexi subtle drive
• Crunch: set it to 9 o’clock to get a dirt crunch sound
• Overdrive: at 11 o’clock the pedal outputs a classic type distortion
• Metal Distortion: from 3 o’clock onwards the Super Badass provides a high-gain metal distortion

After reading these lines you may be thinking this pedal is one of those “good-for-nothing” pedals that tries to do more than it can.

I can assure you this is not the case. Check out some videos and see for yourself the definition of versatile.

Using It With Guitars And Basses, Single Coils Or Humbuckers

Compared to the usual single Tone knob that can be found in most of the overdrive/distortion pedals, the MXR Super Badass has a 3-band equalizer.

And this is actually the secret weapon of the pedal’s versatility.

The problem with some distortion pedals is that the overall pedal’s tone at a given saturation level can be unsuitable for some pickups configurations or even for some amps types.

Thanks to the EQ, you can adjust the pedal tone to your guitar, whether you are using singles or humbuckers, bass or guitar, or even adjust it to your amp’s tone particularities.