Fulltone PlimSoul: The Overdrive That Refused to Choose

Every overdrive pedal ever built has made the same decision before you plug into it. Soft clipping or hard clipping. Tube Screamer or RAT. Diodes in the op-amp’s feedback loop, or diodes shunted to ground. That choice is baked into the circuit board, and it determines almost everything about how the pedal behaves — how it compresses, how it responds to your picking hand, whether it flatters your amp or overrules it.

Michael Fuller built a pedal that refuses to make the decision. The Fulltone PlimSoul runs a soft-clipped overdrive stage and a hard-clipped distortion stage in series, gives you a knob for each, and lets you sit anywhere on the line between them. Not a toggle switch. Not an A/B channel. A blend. In 2010 that was a genuinely unusual proposition, and fifteen years later it is still an unusual one — most pedals that offer “both” clipping types make you pick one with a switch and live with it until the song ends.

What follows is the full story of the PlimSoul: what the circuit actually does, what the controls actually control, which famous-player claims survive scrutiny and which do not, how the current mkII quietly admits what was wrong with the original, and whether a discontinued black box from 2010 is still worth hunting down in 2026.

Where the PlimSoul Came From

By 2010 Fulltone was not a boutique upstart any more. Michael Fuller had been building pedals in California since the early 1990s — the company’s own materials and third-party accounts disagree about whether the founding date is 1991 or 1993, a discrepancy we flagged in our Fulltone Full-Drive 2 MOSFET feature and have never seen cleanly resolved — and by the end of the 2000s the Fulltone OCD had become one of the most-copied overdrive circuits on the planet.

Fuller’s catalogue at that point already covered the soft-clipped world thoroughly. The Full-Drive line was his Tube Screamer answer, built on diodes in the feedback loop, and the OCD used MOSFETs referenced to a voltage divider rather than straight to ground to get something that behaved like a hard-clipped pedal without sounding like a razor. What he did not have was a pedal that let a player move between the two philosophies without changing pedals.

The PlimSoul arrived in 2010 to fill that gap. Premier Guitar reviewed it in October of that year, listing a street price of $169.15 and awarding it four and a half out of five. The pedal was a plain black box with three full-size knobs, one smaller knob, one footswitch and two LEDs, and it did something no other pedal on the wall did.

A Note on the Name

We could not find a documented explanation of the name. “PlimSoul” is one letter away from the Plimsoll line — the load-line marking painted on a ship’s hull to show how deep it can safely sit in the water — and one letter away from the Plimsouls, the Los Angeles power-pop band who scored a minor hit in 1983 with “A Million Miles Away.” Both readings are attractive. A load line is a nice metaphor for a pedal built around how much gain a signal can carry before it goes under, and Fuller is an LA lifer who would certainly know the band. Neither is confirmed by any Fulltone source we could locate, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. If you have seen Fuller explain it in print, we would like to see it.

What the Circuit Actually Does

Clipping is distortion. That is the whole of it. You take a signal, you run it into something that will not pass voltage above a certain threshold, and the tops and bottoms of the waveform get flattened. The character of the distortion depends almost entirely on where in the circuit you put the clipping elements and what those elements are.

Stage One: Soft Clipping

In a soft-clipped design, the clipping diodes sit inside the feedback loop of an op-amp. The result is a rounded, compressed, comparatively polite distortion that tends to sound like the front end of an amp being pushed rather than a separate distortion device. Fulltone’s own current documentation names the family plainly: Tube Screamers, the Full-Drive 2, the Boss OD-1, the Zendrive. If you have played an Ibanez TS808 or a TS9, you know the behaviour: the pedal compresses as you dig in, the midrange swells, and the top end never quite gets nasty.

The PlimSoul’s Stage 1 is that, with a twist. Fulltone describes the soft-clipping stage as “extremely Asymmetrical” — meaning the positive and negative halves of the waveform are clipped at different thresholds, which produces even-order harmonics of the sort people describe as tube-like. Boss did something similar with the SD-1 Super Overdrive by adding a third diode to one leg. Fuller took it considerably further.

Stage Two: Hard Clipping

In a hard-clipped design, the diodes are tied to ground, and the signal is simply cut off at the diode’s forward voltage. It is more aggressive, less compressed, and much more obviously a distortion pedal than an overdrive. This is the ProCo RAT, the MXR Distortion+, the Boss DS-1. Fulltone’s hard-clipping stage is symmetrical — the mirror image of the soft stage’s asymmetry.

Here is the detail that matters most, and it is one that took a decade for Fulltone to state publicly: on the original PlimSoul, the hard-clipping stage uses LEDs as the clipping elements. LEDs have a much higher forward voltage than silicon or germanium diodes — roughly 1.6 to 1.8 volts against silicon’s 0.6 — which means they clip later and louder, producing a comparatively open, loud, uncompressed distortion. It also means the Stage 2 LED on the face of the pedal is not a status indicator that someone wired up for decoration. It is one of the clipping diodes, lighting up because current is passing through it. The brighter it glows, the harder the second stage is working. You are watching the distortion happen.

The Two Stages in Series

The stages run one into the other, soft first and hard second. Turn Stage 2 fully off and you have a soft-clipped overdrive that behaves broadly like a very loud Full-Drive. Turn it up and the hard-clipped stage starts operating on a signal that has already been soft-clipped and compressed — which is a different thing from either type of clipping on its own, and is the actual reason the PlimSoul sounds like the PlimSoul.

Specifications

Specification	Fulltone PlimSoul (original, 2010)
Type	Two-stage overdrive/distortion, soft clipping into hard clipping
Controls	Level, Hi-Cut, Sustain (large knobs); Stage 2 (small knob)
Footswitches	One (bypass)
Indicators	Status LED plus a second Stage 2 LED that brightens with hard-clipping intensity
Stage 1 clipping	Asymmetrical soft clipping (diodes in op-amp feedback loop)
Stage 2 clipping	Symmetrical hard clipping via LEDs tied to ground
Input impedance	500k ohms
Bypass	True bypass
Power	9V battery or 9V–18V DC adapter; 18V raises headroom
Jacks	Side-mounted
Construction	Hand-built in the USA, full-size through-hole components
Finish	Black
Launch street price	$169.15 (Premier Guitar, October 2010)
Status	Discontinued; superseded by the PlimSoul mkII

The Controls, Decoded

Level

Master output. There is a great deal of it — considerably more than unity even at modest settings, which is normal for a Fulltone drive and worth knowing before you stomp it in front of a band. The PlimSoul is perfectly capable of being used as a loud clean-ish boost with Sustain low and Stage 2 off.

Sustain

Gain for Stage 1 only. This is the soft-clipped overdrive control. At noon there is already plenty of dirt; wound fully clockwise, Premier Guitar‘s reviewer found that a Stratocaster’s single-coils “positively howl” and started behaving like humbuckers. Note what this knob does not do: it does not set the overall gain of the pedal, because Stage 2 has its own control.

Stage 2

The small knob, and the reason the pedal exists. It blends in the hard-clipped second stage. Fully counter-clockwise, the stage is out of the picture and you have a soft-clipped overdrive. As you turn it up, the second stage progressively takes over: more aggression, more midrange thickness, a tighter and chunkier crunch, and a visibly brighter Stage 2 LED.

Hi-Cut — and a Naming Problem Worth Understanding

This is the control that trips people up, and it is worth being precise about it. The knob is labelled Hi-Cut, which most players read as “more knob equals more treble removed.” That is not how the pedal behaves. Premier Guitar, with the unit on the bench, described the range as running “from wooly at its lowest setting to a very bright, brilliant sound at its highest” — in other words, clockwise makes it brighter, not darker. The control is effectively a tone knob wired so that turning it down applies the high cut.

The evidence that this labelling was a genuine problem is that Fulltone fixed it. On the mkII the same function is simply called Treble, and Fulltone’s copy specifies that it “now offers plenty of brightness when turned up.” If you buy a used original and it sounds dull, check this knob before you blame the pedal.

Famous Players: What Holds Up and What Does Not

The PlimSoul is a case study in why artist rosters need checking. Equipboard’s page for the pedal claims twenty professional users and surfaces three names at the top: Steve Jones, Michael Landau and Mike Sullivan. We went looking for each of them. The results split cleanly into three tiers, and one of them collapses entirely.

Tier 1: Photo-Documented

Steve Jones is the strongest claim on the list, and it is a good one on its face. The Sex Pistols guitarist is cited on the basis of a Getty Images photograph showing him with a PlimSoul. A press photograph is real evidence of a kind that testimonials and roster pages are not — someone with a camera saw the pedal. We should be straight about the limits, though: we were working from the caption and the citation, not from an inspection of the photograph itself, and a photograph proves the pedal was there on one day rather than that it was a fixture of the rig.

It is also, tonally, the most interesting name on the list. Jones’s famous sound is a Les Paul Custom into a Fender Twin Reverb with very little in between — the man himself has cheerfully said there isn’t a lot to it. A pedal offering blended soft and hard clipping is not the obvious accessory for that approach, which is precisely what makes the sighting worth mentioning.

Tier 2: Manufacturer Claim, Not Independently Corroborated

Michael Landau appears on Fulltone’s own materials as a PlimSoul player, and there is a widely-repeated forum claim that the PlimSoul circuit was based on an early variant Landau preferred. That second claim is the kind of thing that would be genuinely significant if true — a session legend’s private circuit becoming a production pedal is a real story — and it is exactly the kind of thing that circulates on forums without a source. We could not trace it to Fuller, to an interview, or to any Fulltone document.

Worse for the claim, the most detailed independent inventory of Landau’s rig we could find lists a long line of drives and effects — a Maxon SD-9 Sonic Distortion, a Roger Mayer Voodoo-1, a Tycobrahe Octavia, a vintage TS808 in the studio rack — and contains no PlimSoul at all. That does not disprove the connection; rig lists are snapshots and Landau’s changes constantly. It does mean the only evidence for it is a manufacturer’s own roster, which is the weakest tier of evidence there is.

Tier 3: Debunked

Mike Sullivan of Russian Circles does not survive checking, and this one is clean. Two separate published inventories of Sullivan’s rig from 2017 — a detailed interview in which he walked through his big board pedal by pedal, and a transcription of his Premier Guitar Rig Rundown from four months later — list every pedal on the board. Neither contains a PlimSoul.

What both lists do contain is a Fulltone OCD, sitting in the boost position, alongside a Z.Vex Fuzz Factory, Bogner Wessex and Burnley pedals run together through a Keeley looper, and an MXR Micro Amp. And in the interview Sullivan explains that he had already swapped the OCD out for an Xotic AC Booster “because it seems to have more clarity.” A separate list of his gear elsewhere includes a Fulltone Secret Freq.

The likely mechanism here is ordinary and instructive: a crowd-sourced database has a Fulltone-shaped hole in an artist’s entry, someone fills it with the wrong Fulltone, and the entry then gets cited by every aggregator downstream. Three Fulltone pedals appear in Sullivan’s documented history. The PlimSoul is not one of them.

What the Absence Actually Tells You

There is a temptation, writing about a pedal with a thin artist roster, to pad it out with the plausible. We would rather say the useful thing: the PlimSoul does not have a famous-record association, and that is not a defect. It arrived in 2010, well after the era when a single pedal could define a decade’s guitar sound, and it was aimed at players solving a practical problem — one enclosure, two clipping philosophies, limited board space. The people who bought it bought it for that reason, and the long-term owners who turn up in forum threads describe exactly that use case: a decade-plus of ownership, a pedal that covers clean boost through to genuinely high gain, kept because nothing else does the same job.

Tone Recipes

Clock positions below assume a moderately clean amp. All four controls interact more than most pedals’ do, because Stage 2 is operating on whatever Stage 1 hands it.

Sound	Level	Hi-Cut	Sustain	Stage 2	Notes
Loud clean-ish boost	2–3 o’clock	11 o’clock	8–9 o’clock	Off	Touch-sensitive; roll your guitar volume back for near-clean with extra bite
Warm blues overdrive	Noon	10 o’clock	Noon	Off	PG’s Strat setting; mid-forward and thick
British rock crunch	Noon	Noon	Noon	Off	Surprising heft out of single-coils
Howling single-coil lead	Noon	11 o’clock	Maxed	Off	Strat starts behaving like a humbucker guitar
Tight modern rhythm	2 o’clock	11 o’clock	Maxed	Maxed	Dense singing midrange; the pedal’s signature
Nasty blended distortion	9 o’clock	1 o’clock	10 o’clock	Noon	Low Level, low Sustain, Stage 2 doing the work
Fuzz-adjacent	Noon	2–3 o’clock	Maxed	Off	Neck humbucker; PG likened it to a vintage Fuzz Face
Wooly doom	2 o’clock	7–8 o’clock	Maxed	Maxed	Hi-Cut low is where the darkness lives

The mkII, and What It Admits About the Original

Fulltone closed its Culver City shop in 2022 after roughly three decades, following a 2020 controversy over Fuller’s social-media posts during that summer’s protests that saw Guitar Center pull the brand and Reverb suspend sales of new stock. The company relaunched in January 2024 as Fulltone USA in partnership with Jackson Audio, with Brad Jackson as CEO and Fuller as Chief Design Officer. We told that story at length in our Full-Drive 2 MOSFET feature and will not repeat it here.

What matters for the PlimSoul is that the pedal came back — and Fuller used the relaunch to say publicly what he thought was wrong with the original. The current PlimSoul mkII product page is unusually candid for manufacturer copy, and reading it backwards is the single most useful thing you can do before buying a used original.

Feature	PlimSoul (original)	PlimSoul mkII (current)
Hard-clipping elements	LEDs	Two germanium diodes tied to Vref — Fulltone calls it “a night-and-day improvement”
Stage independence	Stages interact; Stage 2 depends on Stage 1’s level	“Truly-independent” — full hard-clipped gain with soft clipping turned down
Input impedance	500k ohms	700k+ ohms, for better guitar-volume-knob interaction
Tone control	Hi-Cut	Treble, with more available brightness
Bass shaping	None	Three-way loss-less Bass switch, placed before the hard-clipping stage
Jacks	Side-mounted	Top-mounted, plus external power port
Line	Standard production	Custom Shop
Price (Sept 2026)	Used, from around $70	$249 new direct; $239 B-stock; around $229 at Sweetwater

The Independence Point Is the Important One

Read that second row again, because it is the thing a spec sheet will never tell you. Marketing copy for the original — including copy still circulating on retailer pages — describes the two stages as “independently controllable.” Fulltone’s own mkII page says that making them “truly-independent” was an improvement over the original, specifically calling out the ability to get “aggressive, punchy gain with the Hard-Clipping knob turned up even while the Soft-Clipping knob is turned down.”

The plain reading is that on the original PlimSoul, Stage 2 is fed by Stage 1, so how much hard clipping you can generate depends on how much signal Stage 1 is passing. That is not a fault — it is what makes the original’s blend behave the way it does, and it explains why the low-Sustain/high-Stage-2 settings feel different on the two pedals. But if you have read that the stages are independent and then find that dropping Sustain thins out your Stage 2 crunch, the pedal is not broken. You are hearing the architecture that Fuller later chose to change.

It is worth noting how rare this is. Most manufacturers revise a circuit and let the old marketing copy stand. Fuller wrote down what the new version fixes, in specifics, with component-level detail. That is more useful to a used buyer than any review.

How It Compares

Buying Guide

The Original, Used

The original PlimSoul is discontinued and trades used from around $70, with typical asking prices running into the low $100s and a handful of Custom Shop and limited-edition variants asking more. At $70 to $120 this is one of the better value propositions in the used drive market: a hand-built American pedal with a genuinely uncommon circuit, at a price where a Chinese-made mini pedal lives new.

Two cautions. First, the original is the version with the LED hard clipping and the interdependent stages — the things Fuller later changed. If your interest in the pedal is specifically the ability to run hard clipping with the soft stage backed off, buy the mkII, because the original does not do that. Second, availability is genuinely thin. Aggregators comparing hundreds of retailers routinely find the original at a single store, because there is no new stock anywhere.

The mkII, New

At $249 direct from Fulltone USA — $239 for B-stock, and around $229 at large retailers — the mkII is priced against the boutique field rather than the used market. What you get for the extra $150 over a used original: germanium hard clipping instead of LEDs, genuinely independent stages, a usable Treble control, a three-way Bass switch, top-mounted jacks, higher input impedance, and a warranty. That is a substantial list, and unusually for a mark-two it does not remove anything.

Who Should Not Buy One

If you want transparency, buy something else — the PlimSoul has a pronounced EQ character and is not trying to disappear. If you need a pedal that stays quiet at high gain settings, be warned: Premier Guitar‘s only real criticism was hiss at the top of the gain range, and recommended a noise gate for players who want maximum saturation and silence. And if you already have a good overdrive and a good distortion and enough board space for both, the PlimSoul’s central argument does not apply to you.

Living With One

The PlimSoul is built to the standard Fulltone spec of the era: powder-coated steel, full-size through-hole components, hand assembly in California, true-bypass switching. These pedals are not fragile, and a fifteen-year-old example that has been on a board its whole life is likely to be fine.

Things to check on a used purchase: that both LEDs work, since the Stage 2 LED is a circuit component rather than an indicator and a dead one means the hard-clipping stage is not behaving; that the pots are not scratchy, particularly the small Stage 2 knob, which sees less rotation and can get lazy from sitting; and that the jacks are tight, as side-mounted jacks on a crowded board take more lateral stress than top-mounted ones.

The one thing you cannot do is get Fulltone to service the original as a warranty item — the original warranty ran to the first owner, and the company that built it closed in 2022. Fulltone USA is a going concern and worth contacting, but treat a used PlimSoul as a pedal you own outright rather than one with support behind it. The circuit is well-documented enough that DIY clone kits exist, which also means any competent tech can work on it.

Frequently Asked Questions