Flux-Drive™

Videos

Reviews

• "The Flux-Drive picks up where the Grid Slammer leaves off—emphasizing focused mids, but with considerably more gain on tap. It also trades the Grid Slammer’s single tone control for a pair of cut/boost bass and treble controls. In many ways, the Flux-Drive’s controls react more like an amplifier’s: Lower reaches of the gain control have a much clearer treble response, and turning up the control rolls off the highs while warming up the midrange and slightly softening the lows. Setting the gain between 8:30 and 10 o’clock highlights the snappier qualities of a Stratocaster’s bridge pickup, while taking the control up to 2 o’clock adds a warm, thick layer of gain on top of plump midrange and darker tonalities reminiscent of Ritchie Blackmore’s leads. The Flux-Drive excels with low- and high-output humbuckers. Both a Les Paul Standard with ’57 Classics and a Les Paul Custom with hot Tom Anderson humbuckers pushed the upper midrange to the forefront, with Flux-Drive’s gain control lending lots of aggression without sacrificing detail. Taking the gain past 3 o’clock won’t add much more to hard-rock rhythms—you can lose a lot of definition in the highs and mids—but it will avail you of syrupy gain for smooth, sustaining licks. That said, there’s plenty of gain on tap before you hit that mark, and using the pedal’s extremely sensitive bass and treble controls more aggressively gives you access to the harder rock tones of early Guns N’ Roses, Mötley Crüe, and Skid Row. The key is to tailor the pedal’s gain and EQ controls to your guitar’s output level and give the tone room to breathe.”

  
  Jordan Wagner
  Premier Guitar

• "The Flux-Drive is more of a high-gain preamp than it is either a stand-alone distortion or overdrive box. Its well-tuned level, gain, bass and treble circuits give the user immense control over the tone and gain structure, making it easily the most versatile of Mesa’s pedal lineup. There’s a lot to be said for the Flux-Drive’s ability to blend with your amp’s character. In front of a clean channel, it produces a beautiful crunch tone, indistinguishable from a real tube-driven second channel. Let this pedal drive your already crunchy tone and it’s capable of transporting you, à la the notable Mesa Mark IV, into an incredibly touch-sensitive world of detailed high-gain tone. Sustain becomes almost endless, and full-up settings on all controls yield the organic sound of tubes pushed to the limit.”

  
  Eric Kirkland
  Guitar World