OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Drive)

Mike Fuller started Fulltone in California in 1991. What he wanted from the OCD was specific: an open-sounding distortion pedal, with decent headroom, that more faithfully copied a tube amp being driven hard.

Headroom is why it can take more than the usual 9 volts. It runs on anything from 9 up to 18, and at the higher voltage it squashes the sound less. Fuller himself dates the pedal’s birth to 2004. One reviewer counts from around 2005. The earliest ones came with the circuit board buried under a goop of epoxy, the way the Klon’s was.

On the outside: Volume, Drive, Tone, and one small switch marked HP/LP. That switch is where a lot of the pedal’s personality lives. The 2006 reviewer put it neatly. High Peak “adds low end and an upper-mid peak and is a good choice for the high gain sounds.” Low Peak “is more natural and truer to your guitar’s actual tone.”

Inside, the clipping is done by a pair of MOSFETs, a kind of transistor, wired to a voltage reference rather than to ground, the usual place. Fulltone says it was the first pedal to clip with MOSFETs. Whatever the order, they behave like gentler diodes, and the distortion comes on more smoothly.

Don’t mistake it for a clean boost. At the bottom of the Drive knob it’s mostly extra volume for the front of your amp. At the top, the same reviewer heard something “as saturated as a Mesa Boogie Triple rectifier, but it’s not as one dimensional.” The good stuff is in between.

Leslie West of Mountain had one on his board in 2008, next to a Boss Blues Driver and a TS-9. He was happy to explain it, name slightly wrong and all: “I really love that Fulltone pedal. It’s called the Obsessive Compulsive Distortion – OCD.”

James Valentine of Maroon 5 ran three overdrives on his board around 2010 and kept coming back to this one. In his words, the Fulltone was “my ballsy, over-the-top gritty soaring solo tone.” Courtney Barnett, talking about her live setup in 2015, kept it simple: “I really like the OCD.” It was one of her main pedals for her heavier sounds, and it stayed on her board while the others around it came and went.

Those are live boards, not records. For records, you have to go to the studio.

Mike Sullivan of Russian Circles made Empros in 2011 with most of the dirt coming from a Sunn amp. “I use an OCD here and there,” he said, “but only for thicker parts.” Manchester Orchestra brought one in, with a Fender Super-Sonic cab, for the Cope sessions in 2014, at their own studio in a house in Atlanta. Nobody has said which songs.

Kyle Shutt of The Sword led a project called Doom Side of the Moon, covering The Dark Side of the Moon. Put on their “Time” and wait for the solo. “When the big note hits in ‘Time,’ it’s sort of the first time the album kicks into high gear,” he said, and it’s his Big Crunch amp “along with a Fulltone OCD overdrive.”

And Neige of Alcest, making Spiritual Instinct, wanted his Jazzmaster to sound like a humbucker guitar. The chain was a Big Muff into a 1970s Marshall JMP. “We also use an OCD. I really love the Fulltone OCD.”

Fuller kept changing it. Version 1 went through a long run of small tweaks, mostly to the EQ, and people started calling them “version 2” and “version 3.” Fulltone says those labels were wrong. The real version 2 came in 2017, with a JFET input that raised the input impedance from 330K to 1 megohm, a new output buffer, and a choice of bypass. Fuller called it the final version.

Then the company itself changed. In 2022 Fulltone shut its Culver City shop after 30 years. In 2024 it came back, with Jackson Audio in Nashville building the pedals and Fuller still designing them. The first two out were the OCD v2 and a Custom Shop copy of version 1.4.

Fuller never stopped fiddling with the box. On stage the ritual stayed the same: leave it on, ride the volume knob, and whatever amp turns up, get a sound.