The Dirty Little Secret MkII (DLS MkII) was designed to be the secret weapon in your tone arsenal. Want to get cranked amp tones at bedroom rocker levels? Playing gigs but have to use whatever amp is provided as the backline? Like your clean amp sound but don’t care for its overdrive channel? Enter the Dirty Little Secret! The DLS MkII is an overdrive pedal designed to bring you the sound and response of a ’70s-era Marshall amplifier. It, like other pedals in our “amp drive” range of pedals, is designed to be a “foundation” overdrive pedal – it is your “always on” pedal that forms the core of your guitar sound which you can enhance and embellish by adding boosters, fuzzes, filters, and other overdrives in front of it – just like you would in front of a real amp. Why a MkII? Well, we’ve learned a lot since we introduced the original Dirty Little Secret in early 2009! Through our other development efforts we’ve picked up a bunch of new ideas and maybe, just maybe, our ears have gotten even sharper. The resulting circuit is a combination of key circuit elements from the actual Marshall pre-amp, tuned for a jFET pedal format in conjunction with very careful parts selection. Every capacitor and resistor in the circuit was carefully scrutinized not only by value but by type to get the desired end result. A lot of time was spent tuning the circuit to stack well with other pedals, especially other gain pedals pushing the DLS MkII. We’ve taken out the Rock/Rawk switch, and have added a two knob tone enhancer. Presence controls the high treble frequencies. It has been carefully voiced to give you useful tones from minimum all the way to maximum, unlike some other pedals where the tone controls only have a narrow sweet spot. The best way to utilize this control is to start at minimum and then turn it up until you get the amount of presence you need to cut through the band. Fullness controls the low, “cab thump” frequencies. You can really hear it’s effect when doing palm-muted chunky chords. Just like the Presence control, start with this control at minimum and then bring it up until you get the desired amount of thump or fullness for your rig and playing style.