I finished the Sole-Mate late last night. I had a chance to play a bit this afternoon and am very pleased. I only had the chance to play it at loud livingroom volumes, which is louder than bedroom volume, but less than gigging volume. I was playing it into my BF Super Reverb with a Weber MASS and Tweed Gibson Falcon at the same time. Both amps were set on the edge of overdrive. Light picking being clean and harder picking bringing out the drive.

The pedal is basically a Marshall pre-amp in pedal form. It has 2 12AX7's run at full voltage, and is built with Eyelet board construction. It came with EH 12AX7's and can use AT's, AY's, AU's etc. I haven't tried any other tubes yet. The parts quality is very good. No mini pots or caps and resistors. These are probably the same parts used in Allen Amps.

It was pretty easy to put together. The instructions were clear and the layout drawing made it easy. It took me 3 nights working after the wife an son went to bed. If you've done any work on amps and have a good soldering iron this should be no problem at all. They are also available assembled. It can be easily modded or "tweeked" and there is plenty of room inside to maneuver in.

It is never truly bypassed. The signal always goes through the first gain stage. I don't have a true bypass loop type pedal to A/B the pedal in and out of the signal path, but I didn't notice anything negative. The pedal is completely clean when the distortion section is bypassed. There is a volume that lets you set the clean sound for unity, or for a boost to goose your amp, much like a clean boost that is left on all the time. There is also a fat switch that affects both the clean and distortion sections of the pedal.

It seems it would be really easy to add another switch to switch between true-bypass and the pedal. There is plenty of room for one. Then you could use the current switch to switch between clean boost and distortion. It would make for a nice two function pedal

The distortion section has pots for gain, bass, treble and master. The mids can be adjusted by changing a resistor inside. You could put this resistor in a socket to make changes easier, or use a small trimpot instead. This is a resistor to ground from the bass pot, like on amps with no mid control. So far I'm happy with how it is stock.

As for the sound, I couldn't be happier. There's not much noise until the gain is really cranked. It's easy to get nice crunchy tones. It can get any thing from light od to more distortion than I would ever use. This sounds pretty obvious, but it has the range of OD/distortion you'd expect from a Marshall. It has nice sustain. There is no loss of bass, in fact you can get some huge low end from this thing depending on how it's set. The treble can go from real cutting to nice an smooth. The tone stack is the same as in the early Marshalls. The overdrive and distortion tones sound so amp like, as you would expect. It is nicely touch sensitive and cleans up well. I know again this sounds pretty obvious, but it sounds like putting a Marshall preamp in front of your amp. There's a quality to it that's hard to describe, but it doesn't sound artificial like some pedals. It has that power when you hit a chord like you get from an overdriven amp.

I had planned on using the Sole-Mate for whatever sound it did best, with various other pedals for differing levels and textures of overdrive/distortion. But now I'm thinking of just using this and my volume knob, with maybe something to goose it's front end a bit. I didn't get a chance to try any, but I'm sure using a clean boost or lite OD pedal to boost the Sole-Mate would work very well. If it works with amps it should work with this. I did try a NVN Dino Fuzz before it and that was a nice combination for something a little over the top.

Now for the drawbacks. This is not for the guys with lots of effects on their pedal board. It's huge, 8.75"x9". It has it's own AC cord with internal transformer. Neither of these bothers me, but I know for some it would be a problem. Also the tubes mount on the top and are only protected by the standard tube covers. Some sort of cage or rollbar type protection would be much safer if you are playing anyplace that some drunk guy may stumble and crash on stage(either audience member or guy in the band ). Also some care would need to be taken in transporting it.

I've rambled enough for now. I'll post more when I have more experience with it.