Overdrive pedals are funny things. We all say we want simple, but then spend half our lives stacking two or three drives together trying to cover different jobs. Clean boost here, mid-push there, something a bit more aggressive when things need to get spicy. The Thorn Soundlabs Bad Cash feels like it was designed by someone who got bored of doing exactly that.
This is a seriously versatile drive pedal. On paper, it might look like overkill – loads of knobs, switches, and a footprint that’s closer to “two pedals pretending to be one” – but once you actually start using it, it all makes a lot of sense.
At lower gain settings, the Bad Cash works beautifully as a clean-ish boost. You can add a bit of thickness and presence without really changing the core character of your amp. Push things a little further and it starts to live very comfortably in Tube Screamer territory, giving you that familiar mid push that works so well with single coils and driven amps. With a bit of a tweak of the EQ, you can turn that mid-focused overdrive tone into a more transparent Klon style drive - like I say, versatility on tap.
Crank it further and it’s perfectly happy heading into more aggressive OCD-style gain. It never gets fizzy or undefined, and thanks to the amount of EQ control on tap, it’s surprisingly easy to keep it sitting where you want in a mix. This is very much a “one pedal, many jobs” kind of drive.
A big part of that flexibility comes from the controls Thorn have built into this thing. The 3-band EQ (or 4, if you count the Presence) is a massive help, especially if you swap guitars or amps regularly. You’re not stuck fighting a fixed voicing – you can actually dial the pedal to suit your rig rather than the other way around.
Then there are the Damping and Headroom controls, which are kind of Thorn Soundlabs’ secret sauce. Damping lets you tighten or loosen the low end of the driven signal, which is invaluable if you’re running higher gain or a darker amp. Headroom controls how hard the pedal pushes into overdrive and even beyond, which makes it feel incredibly dynamic under the fingers. It’s one of those pedals that rewards picking dynamics rather than flattening everything into the same level of crunch.
There are also a couple of toggle switches to change the drive character and voicing, which just adds even more shades to an already very broad palette. None of it feels redundant – it all actually does something useful.
It’s also worth mentioning that this pedal really comes alive at 18V. You can run it at 9V without any issues, but bumping the voltage gives you more headroom, more openness, and a bit more breathing room in the feel. If you’re into touch-sensitive drives that respond like an amp rather than a box of clipping diodes, this is very much in that camp.
Now, let’s address the elephant in the room. This isn’t a sub-£100 pedal, which is usually where this channel lives. But honestly? It’s pretty easy to justify the extra spend. When you consider how much ground it covers – from clean boost, through TS and Klon flavours, right up to proper crunchy overdrive – it covers a fair few roles and in a very convincing way too.
It’s big, it’s bold, it looks like it escaped from a 1960s sci-fi B-movie, and it absolutely does not try to be subtle. But if you want one overdrive that can adapt to pretty much any situation you throw at it, the Bad Cash is a really compelling option.
Less “another overdrive”, more “why do I even need three of these anymore?”.
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