Most boutique overdrives are designed in a quiet room with a favourite amplifier. The designer knows the amp intimately. He knows where it breaks up, which speaker is in it, and how it behaves at the volume he likes. The pedal is voiced against that one reference point, it sounds magnificent through that one reference point, and then it goes out into a world of rented Twin Reverbs, borrowed Hot Rod Devilles, and whatever half-broken combo was waiting at the back of the stage in a town nobody in the band had heard of.
The Browne Protein was designed the other way round. It exists because a working session guitarist got tired of losing that particular lottery.
Adam Sniegowski — a guitarist and producer who spent years on fly dates, arriving at venues with no amplifier of his own and no idea what would be there when he did — went to his friend Dave Brown, a Kansas City amp tech, with a specific and unglamorous request. He had two overdrive pedals he relied on. Each had quirks he wanted fixed. Could Dave put both of them in one box and make them work through anything, including a direct feed to a desk when there was no amp at all?
That is a repair-shop brief, not a boutique-pedal brief. It is also, seven years and four versions later, the reason the Protein turns up on more professional pedalboards than almost any other overdrive released since 2018.
The short version
The Protein is a dual overdrive, hand-assembled in Kansas City, Missouri, that puts two distinct and well-known drive voices side by side in one enclosure and cascades them right-to-left when you engage both.
The green side (right footswitch, first in the signal path) is a reworked take on the Nobels ODR-1 — the Nashville session workhorse. Browne reduced the gain so the whole sweep of the knob is usable, put back some midrange, and tightened the low end to kill the woofiness that has annoyed ODR-1 owners for thirty years.
The blue side (left footswitch, second in the path) is a reworked 1990s Marshall Bluesbreaker — the circuit behind a huge amount of the guitar sound on records like John Mayer’s Continuum, and the ancestor of half the “transparent” drives on the market. Browne fixed the two things everyone complains about on an original: the limited output, and the tone control. The blue side has considerably more headroom and volume on tap than the pedal it descends from.
Run the green into the blue and you get what Browne calls the third channel — a stacked lead voice with more gain and more body that, unusually, does not turn to mush.
Current pricing (checked September 2026): Protein V4 from $299 direct from Browne, $359 at US dealers such as Russo Music; the discontinued V3 from $279 direct while old stock lasts, and around $339 secondhand. UK and European buyers go through Browne’s international dealer network; the pedal reviewed at £319 when it landed in Britain.
The one-line verdict: this is the least mysterious boutique overdrive on the market, and that is exactly the point. Everything about it is a known quantity, executed better than the originals, in a box built to work in the real world.
Where Browne Amplification came from
Dave Brown’s route into pedal building runs through a dead amplifier and a quote he did not want to pay.
In 1998 his reissue Fender Bassman died. The repair estimate came back at around $400 — close to what he had paid for the amp in the first place. Brown had spent his life working on cars. He decided, reasonably enough, that an amplifier chassis could not be harder than an engine bay, and set about learning to fix it himself.
That turned into years of repairing his friends’ old Fenders, which turned into building amplifiers from scratch, which happened for a very specific reason: the guitarist in his band wanted a Vox AC30, and vintage AC30s, as Brown put it, tend to catch fire. They are also not what anyone would call tour-friendly unless you travel with a technician. Brown built an AC30 of his own that worked, decided it sounded as good as anything he had heard, and concluded he might as well build amps rather than buy them.
A note on the name, because it confuses people constantly. The man is David Brown. The company is Browne Amplification, with an E. This is a deliberate stylisation, not a typo on anyone’s part, and it means half the search results you find are spelled one way and half the other. It also means the brand shares its name with Jackson Browne, which produces one of the better coincidences in this article’s player list — see below.
There is one date worth flagging as unreliable. Several dealer pages and aggregator profiles state that Browne Amplification was “established in 2001.” Brown’s own account, given to Guitar.com in May 2021, does not support that as a company founding date: he describes starting on amp repair around 1998, working as a tech and touring musician for years afterwards, and only realising he had a viable business “six or seven years ago” — so roughly 2014 or 2015 — when Sniegowski brought him the Protein brief. The company that ships pedals today was formalised around the Protein’s launch at the end of 2018. Treat 2001 as, at best, the year Brown started trading under a name, and not as the birth of the pedal company.
How the Protein actually happened
Brown’s telling of the launch is the most useful thing in the historical record, because it is specific about numbers.
He took all his savings and bought enough parts to build 100 Proteins. The pedal was launched at the end of 2018 and the production run started shipping in 2019. His stated hope was to sell enough to make his money back. He had been touring heavily, had young children at home, and was looking for a way to stop being gone all the time.
The hundred units sold out fast enough that he described the experience as not knowing what was going on and realising he had to work out how to make it a real business. There was no outside investment then and there has not been since; the company has grown on its own cash, which is why the recurring theme in Browne’s history is demand outrunning supply rather than the other way round.
Sniegowski stayed on as a partner and is responsible for the look — the vintage ham-radio military aesthetic with the enamel badges that has since been imitated widely. Brown’s own summary of his design instincts was blunt: he wanted to put the circuit in a box and get on with it, and Sniegowski is the one who decides when something is finished.
What is actually inside
Here is where the Protein differs sharply from most of the pedals covered in this series, and it is worth dwelling on for a moment.
When we wrote up the King Tone Blues Power, the story was a builder who soldered a functionally dead transistor onto the circuit board purely to mislead anyone photographing the guts. When we wrote up the Vemuram Jan Ray, the story was a decade of dealer copy converging on an origin myth with no evidence behind it. Boutique drive marketing runs on ambiguity, because ambiguity is what lets a shop charge $350 for a circuit whose ancestor sells for $60.
Browne does the opposite. Ask Dave Brown directly whether the blue side is a Bluesbreaker or a Boss BD-2 and the answer, published in the FAQ on his own website, is: “It’s a Bluesbreaker circuit with modifications and an added output section.” Ask him whether the green side replaces a Tube Screamer and he tells you it isn’t one — “it’s more like a Nobels ODR-1” — and then recommends you keep your TS9 and pair it with the blue side instead.
That is a builder talking his customers out of a sale on the grounds that two different flavours are two different flavours. It is also the single strongest argument for taking the rest of Browne’s claims at face value: a company that names its circuit ancestors in its own FAQ has no incentive to fudge anything else.
The blue side: what got fixed
The original Marshall Bluesbreaker pedal, made from 1991, is a low-gain soft-clipping drive with a devoted following and two well-documented problems. It runs out of output early — you often cannot get enough volume out of it to use it as a lead boost — and its tone control does something slightly odd in the upper mids that some guitars hate.
Browne’s version addresses both. The added output section gives the blue side substantially more level than the original could produce, which is what makes it usable as a clean boost and as the second stage of a stack. The tone control was revoiced. The low end is tighter than the original’s somewhat woolly bass response. Reviewers at Guitar.com described the result as “an almost HD take on the old 1990s Marshall Bluesbreaker,” noting a lower-mid lift that particularly flatters vintage Stratocasters, and got recognisable Beano-era tones out of it with a PAF-loaded Les Paul — the Clapton, Angus Young and Paul Kossoff corner of the map.
The green side: what got fixed
The Nobels ODR-1 is the most quietly influential overdrive in Nashville. It has been a fixture on session boards for decades, in large part because its midrange sits differently to a Tube Screamer — no mid hump, a broader spectrum, and a spectrum control that shifts the whole balance rather than just rolling off treble. Players including Tim Pierce and Jerry McPherson are routinely cited by Browne as the reference points for this voice.
Its faults are also well known: the gain knob does very little for the first two-thirds of its travel and then arrives all at once, and the low end can be woofy in a way that gets ugly through a bass-heavy amp. Browne reduced the overall gain so the sweep is usable end to end, rebalanced the mids for more presence, and tightened the bottom. The green side is described by owners as adding low-mid “beef” without mud — which is exactly the complaint the original attracts.
One consequence worth knowing before you buy: the green side’s output level is heavily dependent on where the gain knob sits. Brown’s own guidance is that at roughly two-thirds gain you will find unity around halfway on level, but at one-third gain you may need level at two-thirds to three-quarters to hit unity. Several owners have written to him convinced the pedal was faulty because the green side seemed quiet. It is not; it is interactive.
Specifications
Version history, and one contradiction on Browne’s own website
Four generations are in circulation. Getting this right matters if you are buying used, because the versions sound closer than they look but are not equally convenient.
- V1 (launched late 2018, shipping 2019) — the original 100-unit run and its immediate successors. Side jacks, mechanical footswitches.
- V2 / V2.2 (through roughly 2022) — side-mounted jacks, mechanical true-bypass switching, two internal switches for loop mode, under 30 mA draw. This is the version most of the 2021 magazine reviews tested, and the version on most of the older documented pro boards.
- V3 (from roughly 2023) — top-mounted jacks, soft switching instead of mechanical, a single internal switch for split mode. Browne states they worked hard to make V2 and V3 sound the same and that any audible difference comes from parts tolerances rather than a circuit change.
- V4 (2025–present) — adds the 3-way Hi-Cut toggle to the blue side, borrowed from the Carbon V2, plus three internal DIP switches on the green side: bass/low cut, a heavier clipping mode, and an asymmetrical clipping option.
Now the contradiction. Browne’s own Protein page carries two blocks of text that disagree with each other. The FAQ says clearly that the hi-cut switch and the three green-side dip switches are the V4 additions, and that the V3’s power draw is 130 mA. The specification paragraph directly above it says the V3 “includes top mounted jacks, soft switching, and a single internal switch for loop mode, Hi-cut switch for the blue side and 3 internal options for the green side” and gives the V3 draw as under 100 mA, with 130 mA assigned to the V4.
Both cannot be right. The reading that fits every other source — the V4 press coverage, the dealer listings, and the description of the hi-cut as a feature carried over from the Carbon V2 — is that the hi-cut and the green DIPs are V4 features, and that the V3 spec paragraph is a copy-paste error made when the page was updated for the V4 launch. The practical upshot for a used buyer: if the pedal has a visible toggle switch between the two sides, it is a V4. Do not pay a V4 price for a V3 because a listing quoted the wrong paragraph from the manufacturer’s site.
Power supply planning also needs care here. A V4 wants a real 130 mA of clean current. A lot of older isolated supplies allocate 100 mA per port. That is a genuine incompatibility, not a rounding error, and it is a common cause of “my new Protein sounds thin and gated” posts.
Famous players
The Protein has an unusually well-documented user list for a pedal this young, partly because Dave Brown has told the origin stories himself in print and partly because the pedal photographs distinctively. What follows is split by how strong the evidence is.
Documented by the builder, on the record
Drew Shirley (Switchfoot) is the first name in the chain and Brown’s own nominated proudest moment. Shirley was touring with a mutual friend, Brown showed him a Protein, Shirley wanted one on his board. Brown is a fan of Switchfoot’s Hello, Hurricane, which makes the anecdote a nicer one than the usual endorsement story.
John Shanks and Phil X (Bon Jovi) came next, and directly out of the Shirley connection. Switchfoot went out on tour with Bon Jovi. Brown got a phone call. Shanks and Phil X each bought two Proteins for a South American run. Note that these were purchases, not endorsement placements — Brown is explicit about that, and it is a meaningfully stronger signal. Shanks is also the man behind the Vemuram Shanks ODS-1, which means one working guitarist has now put his name on one boutique overdrive and quietly bought four of somebody else’s.
David Ryan Harris got hold of a Protein and told Brown it was his favourite pedal. Harris is a guitarist and songwriter best known for long stints alongside John Mayer and for work with Nick Jonas & the Administration; Equipboard’s entry for him shows the Protein on his live board via an Instagram post, and notes he has discussed it in interviews. Multiple independent confirmations for the same claim, which is more than most artist attributions get.
Documented on video or in photographs
Charlie Worsham — the Nashville guitarist, singer and songwriter has a Protein V3 on his board in a Premier Guitar Rig Rundown hosted by John Bohlinger, filmed at the Sony/ATV studios in Nashville. Worsham is exactly the constituency the green side was voiced for: the modern Nashville session and touring world where the ODR-1 has been standard issue since before most of its current users were born. If you want to hear what this pedal was designed to do, that is the reference.
Mike Zito — the blues guitarist’s Protein V3 is visible at 7:02 in his own Premier Guitar Rig Rundown. A useful counterweight to the Nashville framing: the same pedal, doing a completely different job, in a Texas-blues context closer to Stevie Ray Vaughan than to a session date.
Mason Stoops — the Los Angeles session guitarist posted a backup board in November 2021 built around a Protein V2.2, with a Benson boost, describing the two halves of the Browne as “tighter than the ’87 Weathers//Schwarzenegger predator handshake.” The run in question was with Jackson Browne, which means the definitive social-media documentation of the Browne Protein comes from a board assembled for a tour with a different, unrelated Browne. Nobody planned this.
Michael “Mick” Taylor — the Protein appears throughout the That Pedal Show episode in which Taylor and Dan Steinhardt cover it, on Taylor’s own board. Read that name carefully. This is Mick Taylor the British guitarist, writer and former Guitarist magazine editor who co-hosts That Pedal Show — not the Mick Taylor who replaced Brian Jones in the Rolling Stones. The two are entirely different people and the databases do not always distinguish them. This is the third consecutive article in this series where a name collision has nearly put a false claim into print, and it is now a standing check rather than a curiosity.
Miguel Fonseca (Bizarra Locomotiva) — the Portuguese industrial metal guitarist announced his Protein V2.2 on Instagram on 2 September 2021, thanking Browne for setup advice. Worth including precisely because it is nobody’s idea of a blues-and-country pedal: the green side into the blue side is a legitimate heavy-rock rhythm sound if the amp underneath it is already doing the work.
Los Bunkers — Francisco Durán, Mauricio Durán and Álvaro López — the Chilean band’s official Instagram documented pedalboards from the “Ven Aquí” tour of 2023 and 2024 carrying Protein V3 units across three separate players. Three Proteins in one touring band is unusual and explains why Equipboard’s genre tally for the V3 shows Latin, Latin Rock, Rock En Español and Chilean Rock all clustered together with identical counts — that is one band, not a movement, and anyone reading those numbers should know it.
Ángel Parra (Los Tres) — documented on Instagram with a Protein V3. Parra also turned up in our King Tone Blues Power research, which makes him one of the more reliably documented boutique-drive users in South America.
Listed but not verified
Equipboard’s V2.2 page carries an entry for Zach Williams whose entire supporting note reads “Featured at 7:51 seconds into Mayer’s Rig rundown.” The annotation does not name the pedal, does not clarify which Zach Williams is meant, and attaches a John Mayer rig video to a musician who is not in John Mayer’s band. It looks like a mis-filed entry, quite possibly one that belongs to David Ryan Harris. We are not printing Zach Williams as a Protein user. If better evidence turns up, we will add him.
It is also worth noting what is not claimed. Browne’s marketing says the Protein is “found on the board of pro’s all over the world,” which is true and vague, and the company has never published a roster of the kind that has caused this series so much trouble with other brands. The verified list above is the list.
Settings that work
All positions given on a clock face. Assume a clean-ish amp somewhere near the edge of breakup; the Protein was voiced to push a real power section and it flatters an amp that is already leaning.
1. The always-on (blue side)
Blue: Level 1–2 o’clock, Gain 8 o’clock, Tone 12 o’clock. Hi-Cut in the middle position on a V4. This is the setting most Protein owners land on and never leave — barely any distortion, a firm push into the amp, slightly fatter lower mids. Owners repeatedly describe leaving the blue side engaged the way people used to leave a JHS Morning Glory on. If you only ever use one setting on this pedal, it will be this one.
2. Nashville rhythm (green side)
Green: Level 11 o’clock, Drive 2 o’clock, Tone 11 o’clock. Telecaster, bridge pickup. This is the green side doing the job it was designed for — the ODR-1 voice with the gain knob behaving itself. Notice how much less mid hump there is than a Tube Screamer would give you; chords stay wide open, and the top end has air that a TS808 would have rolled off. Country pickers in the Brent Mason tradition will recognise the territory immediately.
3. The stack (the third channel)
Green: Level 12, Drive 2 o’clock, Tone 11. Blue: Level 1 o’clock, Gain 10 o’clock, Tone 12. Both engaged. This is the sound the pedal exists for. More gain, more sustain, more body, and — the genuinely impressive part — still individually audible notes inside a chord. Most stacked overdrives compress into a single grey texture at this point. Browne’s fix was the blue side’s headroom: it has enough clean range to absorb the green side’s output without folding.
4. Blues lead, humbuckers
Blue only: Level 2 o’clock, Gain 12–1 o’clock, Tone 1 o’clock. Les Paul, neck pickup, guitar volume at 8. The blue side’s Bluesbreaker heritage is at its most obvious here, and it is a more focused, less woolly version of the sound than the 1991 original manages. Roll the guitar volume back and it cleans up properly rather than just getting quieter.
5. Direct-to-desk emergency
Green: Level 12, Drive 11 o’clock, Tone 10 o’clock. Blue: Level 12, Gain 9 o’clock, Tone 10 o’clock. Both on, feeding an amp simulator or a DI. This is the original design brief — Sniegowski needed colours that survived going direct when there was no usable amp. Roll both tone controls darker than you think you need; without a speaker rolling off the top for you, the settings that sound right in a room will sound harsh in a desk.
6. Tight modern rhythm (V4 only)
Green side with the internal bass-cut DIP engaged and heavier clipping selected: Level 11, Drive 3 o’clock, Tone 12. Into an already-driven amp. This is the setting that makes sense of Miguel Fonseca’s Protein being on an industrial metal board. The bass cut is the important switch; without it the green side’s low end will swamp a high-gain amp.
7. Chime and sparkle
Blue only, Hi-Cut in the brightest position: Level 1 o’clock, Gain 9 o’clock, Tone 2 o’clock. Stratocaster, neck-and-middle. Vintage Strats are what reviewers singled out as the blue side’s best partner, and the added lower-mid weight is exactly what a single-coil into a small amp usually lacks.
How it compares
Against the King Tone Duellist
The closest structural rival, and a genuinely instructive comparison. The Duellist is also two drives in a box that stack, but its pairing is a Tube Screamer and a Bluesbreaker rather than an ODR-1 and a Bluesbreaker. That one substitution changes everything: the Duellist gives you the classic mid-hump option, the Protein gives you the flat-and-wide option. The Duellist offers more switching depth (external DIPs, order switching, per-side voicings on the V3), the Protein offers a simpler surface and, by most owner accounts, a better-behaved stacked mode. Price is close — $349.99 for the Duellist V3, $299 to $359 for the Protein depending on where you buy. If you already own a Tube Screamer you want to keep, the Protein complements it and the Duellist duplicates it.
Against the Analog Man King of Tone
The King of Tone is the other dual overdrive in this conversation and, historically, the one with the waiting list. Both are twin low-gain drives; the King of Tone runs two versions of the same circuit family, the Protein runs two different ones. Owners comparing them directly — and there are threads dedicated to exactly this — tend to report that the Protein’s blue side is smoother and less biting than the King of Tone, and that the Protein is easier to buy, which is not a small consideration. If you want one instead of the other, the deciding question is whether you want two flavours of the same idea or two different ideas. The Prince of Tone is the single-channel entry point to the same debate.
Against the Nobels ODR-1 itself
The green side is not a clone and Browne does not claim it is. It has less gain overall, more usable gain distribution, more midrange presence and a tighter low end. What it does not have is the ODR-1’s spectrum control, which is one of the original’s genuine party tricks. At around $70 for a Nobels ODR-1 BC against $299 for a whole Protein, the honest advice is: if all you want is the Nashville voice, buy the Nobels. You are paying for the blue side and the stack.
Against the Bluesbreaker derivatives
The blue side sits in a crowded field. The JHS Morning Glory V4 is the best-known modern Bluesbreaker and the most direct comparison; multiple owners have reported replacing a Morning Glory with a Protein specifically for the extra gain range and the better stacking behaviour. The Keeley D&M Drive is another two-in-one with a Bluesbreaker-adjacent side and a boost. The Wampler Belle approaches the transparent-drive question from the ODR-1 side instead. And the MXR Timmy remains the cheapest way to find out whether you actually like transparent overdrive before spending $300 to find out properly.
Against its own siblings
This is the part people get wrong when shopping. Browne has split the Protein into standalone pedals, and the naming is not intuitive:
- Carbon = the blue side (Bluesbreaker) on its own. Brown announced this in May 2021 — asked what was next for the company, he said “we are going to do the blue side of the Protein on its own,” because so many players had asked. Currently around $229 for the V2.
- Carbon X = two Carbons in one box, around $359.
- ATOM = the green side (ODR-1) on its own, sold as the Nashville Overdrive. Reworked again for the standalone release with lower gain, restored mids and tighter lows — changes that push it closer to Tube Screamer territory than the Protein’s green side sits. Later reissued under the name Alkene.
- Gritador = a separate Tube Screamer-derived drive. The name means “screamer” in Portuguese. It is not the green side of the Protein, despite at least one dealer blog describing the Protein’s two sides as being available separately “as the Carbon and the Gritador.” That is wrong; the green side’s standalone is the ATOM/Alkene.
If you want one voice rather than two, work out which side you actually want first. Buying a Gritador expecting the Protein’s green channel is a mistake several people have made in public.
Buying guide, September 2026
New, direct from Browne: Protein V4 from $299, Protein V3 from $279 while old stock remains, in a long list of finishes plus discounted “blem” units with cosmetic paint flaws and full warranty. Buying direct is meaningfully better for the company than buying through a dealer, and Browne says so on the page.
New, US dealers: around $359 for the V4 at shops such as Russo Music. The gap over direct pricing is real; the tradeoff is stock on hand rather than a wait.
International: Browne does not ship internationally from the site and directs buyers to its dealer network. The pedal reviewed at £319 in the UK in 2021.
Used: V2 and V2.2 units come up regularly and are the value play if you do not need top jacks. Equipboard’s tracked figures put the V2.2 around $359 and the V3 around $339 as marked prices, but real completed sales run lower. Four checks before you buy secondhand:
- Look for a toggle between the two sides. Toggle present = V4. No toggle, top jacks = V3. Side jacks = V2 or earlier.
- Confirm your power supply can deliver the current. 30 mA for a V2 is nothing; 130 mA for a V4 will exceed a lot of older isolated ports.
- Ask whether the internal split switch has been flipped. If a previous owner set it to split mode and you plug in standard TS cables, the pedal will behave strangely. It is four screws and a flick to reset.
- Do not expect a battery compartment. There isn’t one, on any version. This is a mains-only pedal.
Who should not buy one
Three groups.
If you want a pedal with a strong personality of its own — a Klon-style mid-forward voice, or something that fundamentally recolours your rig — the Protein is the wrong pedal. Its entire design philosophy is to be a better version of two circuits you have already heard.
If your amp is genuinely small and clean and stays that way — a bedroom modeller at conversational volume, say — you are paying for headroom you cannot use. Both sides of this pedal were voiced to push a power section that is already working.
And if you only want one of the two voices, buy the Carbon or the ATOM/Alkene. Half a Protein at $229 is better value than a whole one you use half of.
Living with one
The recurring practical notes from owners, in rough order of how often they come up:
Put it last in your drive chain. This is Brown’s own recommendation and it has a technical reason behind it: the blue side has enormous headroom and compresses gracefully, so it takes whatever you throw into it and holds together. Owners report stacking a JHS Bonsai or a Klon-style drive in front of the blue side with good results. Running other drives after the Protein is the less rewarding direction.
The green side can go muddy on chords. This is the most consistent criticism. It inherits some of the ODR-1’s low-end character even after Browne’s tightening, and players doing dense chord work through a bass-heavy amp sometimes want a bass trim that the V3 does not have. The V4’s internal bass-cut DIP is a direct response to this complaint, and is the single best reason to prefer a V4 over a V3.
The green side is darker than the blue side. Owners describe the blue side as the clear, amp-like one and the green as the versatile-but-darker one. If you expected the ODR-1 side to be the bright one, adjust expectations.
It stays on. The single most common thing Protein owners say is that the blue side lives in the engaged position and the footswitch mostly gets used to turn it off for a specific clean passage. Plan your board around that, not around it being an occasional lead boost.
Split mode is genuinely useful if you run a switcher. The TRS arrangement lets an RJM Mastermind, a Boss ES-5 or similar treat the two sides as independent loops, which means you can preset the stack and step on it once. Given that the pedal’s best sound is the stacked one and there is no single footswitch to engage both, this is not a luxury feature.
Frequently asked questions
Which side comes first?
The green side, on the right, is first in the signal path and cascades into the blue side on the left. This is fixed and cannot be reversed on any version.
Is the blue side a Bluesbreaker or a BD-2?
A Bluesbreaker, with modifications and an added output section. Dave Brown states this in the FAQ on Browne’s own website, which puts the Protein in a small minority of boutique pedals whose builder names the ancestor circuit himself.
Can I run it at 18V?
No. Browne is unusually firm about this: 9V DC centre-negative only, and the company’s position is that the pedal was designed to have plenty of headroom at 9V so 18V offers nothing. There is no battery option either.
Can I turn both sides on with one footswitch?
Not on the pedal itself. Browne’s own suggested workaround is to leave both sides engaged and put the whole pedal in a switcher loop. Alternatively, use the internal split switch and TRS cables to give each side its own loop in a programmable switcher.
Why is my green side so quiet?
It is not faulty. The green side’s output level depends heavily on the gain setting. At around two-thirds gain, unity sits near halfway on level; at one-third gain you may need level at two-thirds to three-quarters to reach unity. Set the gain first, then find unity with the level knob.
Is the Protein worth it over a Nobels ODR-1 plus a Morning Glory?
Financially, no — you can assemble a comparable pair for well under $200. What you gain from the Protein is one enclosure instead of two, a stacked mode that was voiced deliberately rather than by accident, more headroom on the Bluesbreaker side than a Morning Glory delivers, a tighter low end on the ODR-1 side, and split-mode switcher integration. Whether those are worth the difference depends entirely on whether pedalboard real estate has a price for you.
What is the difference between the Protein, the Carbon and the ATOM?
The Carbon is the Protein’s blue side (Bluesbreaker) as a standalone pedal, around $229; the Carbon X is two of them in one box. The ATOM, later reissued as the Alkene, is the green side (ODR-1) as a standalone, reworked again with lower gain and restored mids. The Gritador is a separate Tube Screamer-derived design and is not a Protein channel, despite what some dealer write-ups claim.
How do I tell a V3 from a V4 in a used listing?
Look for a small toggle switch sitting between the two channels — the 3-way Hi-Cut. If it is there, it is a V4. If the pedal has top-mounted jacks but no toggle, it is a V3. Side-mounted jacks mean V2 or earlier. Ignore the version stated in the listing text; sellers frequently copy the wrong paragraph from Browne’s website, which itself contains contradictory version information.