This post featured on Reverb has been flying around Instagram for the past couple days. BILLIE JOE ARMSTRONG of GREEN DAY fame has teased a signature pedal from the creative hands of DUNLOP’S MXR. The general speculation is that his will be a distortion pedal, which is an obvious deduction based on the knob that said “gain” under it. Apart from this post, there wasn’t much information on the pedal itself until more details were released at the 2019 NAMM show.
After doing some digging, we discovered that allegedly, the pedal will model the DOOKIE album guitar tone, which was a blend of a scooped high gain amp, and a midrange boosted amp. The blend knob on the pedal supposedly is there to allow you to determine how much of each amp you’d want to hear. The release of this pedal marks the 25th anniversary of the band’s groundbreaking album.
Here’s what the Dunlop folks had to say about the pedal (via the Dunlop website):
“Billie Joe Armstrong’s guitar tone on Green Day’s groundbreaking album Dookie sounded dirty and punchy with the perfect amount of articulation to express the musicality of his fast, melodic riffs. He got that sound by running his signal through two heavily modified amplifiers—one scooped with a ton of gain and the other with a well-defined midrange. When it came time to mix the record, the band blended the two signals together in different ratios to match the vibe of each track.”
You can learn more about the MXR Dookie Drive on the Dunlop website here. Don’t forget to follow our coverage of NAMM to get the latest gear developments and updates!
