EarthQuaker Devices Palisades: The Tube Screamer They Swore They Would Never Build

Every boutique pedal company eventually builds a Tube Screamer. It is a rite of passage, like a bar band learning “Mustang Sally.” EarthQuaker Devices spent years insisting they were the exception — that the Akron workshop turning out fuzzes named after geological formations and doom-metal album titles had no interest in reheating the most cloned circuit in the history of the guitar.

Then, in May 2014, they gave in. And because it is EarthQuaker, they did not give in quietly. The Palisades arrived with five knobs, two rotary switches, two toggles, three footswitches and a subtitle — Mega Ultimate Overdrive — that reads less like a product name than a dare. Six clipping voices. Five bandwidth settings. Two independent gain channels. A separate boost. An input buffer you can switch out of the circuit entirely. Thirty distinct versions of the effect before you touch a single knob.

EarthQuaker’s own launch copy did not pretend otherwise: “The Palisades is something we said we would never do… an overdrive based on the legendary TS808! After loads of requests, we finally buckled.”

This is a feature, not a review. We are not handing out stars. We are here to explain what the Palisades actually is, what those thirty combinations really do, which players genuinely used one — and why a pedal this ambitious is now sitting on the discontinued list, hunted on the used market by people who should have bought one in 2019.

Akron’s Anti-Tube-Screamer, And Why It Took Them Six Years

EarthQuaker Devices’ origin story — Jamie Stillman, a basement in Akron, Ohio, a company built by a touring musician who got tired of touring — is told in full in our features on the EarthQuaker Devices Hoof Fuzz and the Acapulco Gold, so we will not repeat it here. What matters for the Palisades is the house philosophy that story produced: EarthQuaker built its reputation on pedals nobody else was making. Bit crushers. Octave-up monsters. Reverbs with a control literally labelled “Drag.” A one-knob distortion with no tone control at all.

A Tube Screamer clone is the exact opposite of that. It is the safest, most crowded, most thoroughly solved corner of the pedal market. So when EarthQuaker finally entered it, the company’s stated method was almost comically thorough:

“We ran tests with every popular clone on the market as well as several vintage originals, compared, contrasted and took loads of notes. It was exhausting but informative. In the end, we threw it all away, used our ears and came up with what we feel is the most versatile relative of the 808 available today.”

That last phrase is the design brief in miniature. Not the most accurate relative of the 808. The most versatile. EarthQuaker’s answer to a saturated market was not to build a better copy but to build a machine that could be thirty copies at once — and then a dozen things a Tube Screamer has never been.

The Palisades Timeline: 2014 To The Legacy Page

13 May 2014 — EarthQuaker announces the Palisades. It is publicly demoed at the 2014 Summer NAMM show in Nashville alongside three other new devices — the Afterneath reverb, the Cloven Hoof fuzz and the Arrows boost. Premier Guitar and Guitar World both file demo videos from the booth. US price: $249.

January 2016 — Trevor Curwen reviews the pedal for Guitarist and MusicRadar at £229/$249, and immediately reaches for the arithmetic: “30 variations on the character of the effect before you even start to tweak.“

October 2017 — Richard Purvis reviews it for Guitar Magazine (now Guitar.com) at £245, concluding that “this box could replace three others.“

4 December 2017 — EarthQuaker announces V2. The Palisades is one of four pedals updated in the same batch, alongside the Arpanoid V2, the Grand Orbiter V3 and The Warden V2. Every one of them gets soft-touch, relay-based switching in place of the older hard-click mechanical footswitches, plus EarthQuaker’s Flexi-Switch behaviour: tap for standard latching, hold for momentary. UK RRP for the Palisades V2: £249.

Somewhere after that — the Dunes arrives: a compact, three-voice, two-bandwidth distillation of the Palisades in a standard-size enclosure, for players who wanted the sound without the real estate.

As of 2026 — both are gone. EarthQuaker’s product pages for the Palisades and the Dunes now carry the same blunt line in capital letters: THIS DEVICE IS NO LONGER IN PRODUCTION. The Palisades survives only on the legacy list and the used market. The company’s current Tube-Screamer-adjacent offering is the far simpler, far cheaper Plumes.

One small correction while we are on chronology: Equipboard’s spec table lists the Palisades’ production years as “2015 – 2017.” That understates it at both ends. The pedal was announced in May 2014 and V2 shipped from December 2017 onward, remaining in the catalogue for years afterward.

Specifications

Item	Detail
Model	EarthQuaker Devices Palisades Mega Ultimate Overdrive
Type	“808-style” dual-channel overdrive with independent boost
Announced	13 May 2014; demoed at Summer NAMM 2014, Nashville
Launch price	$249 US / £229–£249 UK
Origin	Hand-built in Akron, Ohio, USA
Knobs	Boost, Gain A, Volume, Gain B, Tone
Rotary switches	Voice (6 positions), Bandwidth (5 positions)
Toggles	Normal/Bright; Buffer On/Off
Footswitches	Activate (true bypass), Gain B, Boost
Clipping voices	1. No diodes · 2. LED · 3. MOSFET · 4. Asymmetrical silicon · 5. Symmetrical silicon · 6. Schottky
Switching	V1: mechanical hard-click. V2: relay-based soft-touch with Flexi-Switch (latching + momentary)
Dimensions	4.75 x 5.65 x 2.25 in (121 x 144 x 57 mm) with knobs
Current draw	25 mA
Input impedance	500 kΩ
Output impedance	<10 kΩ
Power	9V DC only, 2.1 mm centre-negative. No battery option. Relay switching requires power to pass signal.
Status	Discontinued. Legacy product as of 2026.

A note on that dimensions row: EarthQuaker’s own page gives 121 x 144 x 57 mm, while Guitar.com’s review spec box printed 144 x 125 x 59 mm. The two disagree by a couple of millimetres and appear to have the width and depth transposed. We have gone with the manufacturer’s figure. Either way, the practical point is the one that matters: this is a wide pedal — roughly the footprint of two standard boxes side by side, and taller than most. Measure your board before you buy one.

What The Thirty Combinations Actually Do

The marketing number is 6 x 5 = 30. That is true but not useful on its own, so here is what each rotary actually controls.

The Voice switch: swapping the clipping diodes on the fly

Plenty of dirt pedals offer alternative clipping. Most hide it on an internal DIP switch you set once and forget, or on a three-way toggle. The Palisades puts six options on a rotary you can turn mid-song:

• 1 — No diodes. The clipping section is out of the circuit entirely. This is the most open, least distorted setting: pure op-amp gain running from clean boost up to a gritty, uncompressed distortion with a huge volume lift.
• 2 — LED. Light clipping with a high headroom ceiling, so the volume stays big. Loud and comparatively clean.
• 3 — MOSFET. Light-gain overdrive with strong harmonic content. EarthQuaker liked this one enough to make it one of the Dunes’ three voices.
• 4 — Asymmetrical silicon. Tighter, lower-gain, and the setting EarthQuaker itself calls “closest to stock 808.“
• 5 — Symmetrical silicon. Tighter still and more distorted.
• 6 — Schottky. Looser and fuzzier. The furthest thing here from a Tube Screamer.

Voice 4 deserves a footnote, because it is the one specification that has caused genuine confusion. A stock TS808 clips symmetrically — two matched silicon diodes in the op-amp feedback loop. So EarthQuaker labelling the asymmetrical position as the 808-alike looks, on paper, backwards. Guitar.com’s Richard Purvis flagged exactly this in 2017 — “Hang on… the TS clips symmetrically, right?” — and then had to concede that with gain low and bandwidth at maximum the thing “sounds much greener than it looks.” The honest reading is that EarthQuaker tuned by ear, not by schematic, and named the voice after where it landed rather than after its topology. If you want a textbook 808, the TS9 and the Maxon OD808 are still sitting right there. If you want something that behaves like one, voice 4 does the job.

The Bandwidth switch: the low-end control Tube Screamer owners have wanted for forty years

This is the more important of the two rotaries, and the one that genuinely separates the Palisades from the pack. The single most-complained-about property of the TS circuit is its bass cut — the mid-hump is created partly by hollowing out the lows, which is exactly why it works so well shoved into a cranked amp and exactly why it can sound thin on its own.

Bandwidth gives you five positions on that filter. Position 1 is the thinnest, with the least gain. Position 5 is the fattest, with the most. EarthQuaker’s own manual is emphatic that this is not a minor trim: it “has a major effect on all the settings of the Palisades, especially the Gain and Voice controls.” Turn the bandwidth down and the same voice becomes a different pedal — snappier, more cutting, less gain. Turn it up and you get low end a Tube Screamer has never had, which is why the Palisades will do things closer to a Fulltone OCD or a fuzz-adjacent roar than to anything green.

Two channels, one boost, four gain levels

Gain A is the lower-gain channel and is always the active one. Stamping the Gain B footswitch swaps in the second, higher-gain knob without changing anything else. Stamping Boost adds the output lift set by the Boost knob. Because the two are independent, you get four discrete levels under your feet: A, A+boost, B, B+boost. On a stage, that is rhythm, lifted rhythm, lead and hero lead, all from one enclosure, all footswitchable, with no volume drop between them.

The two toggles

Normal/Bright is a treble character switch: Normal is warm and full, Bright is livelier with more chime. Owners consistently report it does real work — it adds attack for dark humbucker guitars, and, counter-intuitively, one player noted it can help tame a bright Telecaster with a maple neck by shifting where the presence sits rather than simply adding top.

Buffer switches the input buffer in or out. On is tighter and brighter; off is warmer with more sag. The buffer is part of the drive circuit and is only in play when the pedal is engaged, so it will not affect your bypassed tone either way. If you run a fuzz — a Fuzz Face, say — anywhere near the front of your chain, the buffer-off position is your friend.

Famous Players: Verified, With The Errors Corrected

The Palisades has a genuinely broad user base — Equipboard tracks 30 professional users, one of the highest counts we have seen on an EarthQuaker dirt pedal. Here is what actually holds up when you go to the sources.

Dave Catching — Eagles of Death Metal (verified, with detail)

The strongest documentation belongs to Dave Catching, the Eagles of Death Metal touring lead guitarist and co-founder of the Rancho de la Luna studio in Joshua Tree. Premier Guitar’s Rig Rundown, filmed at the High Noon Saloon in Madison on 10 September 2015 and published 7 October, walks through his board in full: a PolyTune, a Cry Baby, a Rotovibe, “an EarthQuaker Devices Palisades that he uses for solo boosts,” a Fulltone Ultimate Octave Fuzz, a Hall of Fame, an EarthQuaker Dispatch Master, a Flashback, a Mantic Flex and a Malekko Scrutator. He was running it into Orange OR50 heads with the amp’s own gain dialled back to about half, taking all his dirt from the floor. The Palisades is also credited on EODM’s 2015 album Zipper Down. Catching has also worked extensively with Josh Homme across the Rancho de la Luna and Queens of the Stone Age orbit, though the Palisades usage documented here is EODM-specific.

Ilan Rubin — Nine Inch Nails / The New Regime (verified by direct quote)

In an interview published by EarthQuaker themselves, Rubin — a multi-instrumentalist best known as the drummer for Nine Inch Nails and the whole of his own project The New Regime — named it directly: “I’m using a lot of those single knob pedals like the Bows; the Acapulco Gold is fantastic and the Palisades is a phenomenal pedal.” That is a first-party source, and about as clean as artist verification gets.

Correction: Equipboard’s entry lists Rubin’s band affiliation as “Foo Fighters.” That is wrong. Rubin has played with Nine Inch Nails, Angels & Airwaves, Paramore and his own The New Regime. He is not a member of the Foo Fighters.

Nick Reinhart — Tera Melos (verified via Pedals and Effects)

Reinhart demonstrated and discussed the Palisades on Pedals and Effects, the long-running effects show he co-hosts with Juan Alderete, and he is one of the most-cited EarthQuaker power users anywhere — the Bit Commander, Tentacle, Organizer and Rainbow Machine have all passed through his rig.

Correction: Equipboard lists Reinhart’s band as “Death Grips.” He is the guitarist and singer of Tera Melos, and has also played in Bygones and Big Walnuts Yonder. This is the second band-field error on the same page, which is a good reminder to check the caption rather than the label.

Takeshi Ohtani — Boris (verified by photo)

The Palisades is visible on the pedalboard of Boris’s Takeshi, whose live rig is a monument to excess — a wall of Sunn and Orange amplifiers feeding a board packed with boutique fuzz, an Afterneath and a Bit Commander. EarthQuaker’s own artist feature quotes his goal plainly: “I want the audience to use all of their five senses. Forget about the daily life.” A pedal with thirty settings fits comfortably into that worldview.

Albert Hammond Jr — The Strokes (verified by photo)

Hammond posted a photo of his pedalboard to his own Twitter account in 2014 — within months of the Palisades’ launch — with the pedal clearly in the chain. An early adopter, and a useful counter-example to the assumption that this is only a heavy-music tool.

Also documented

• Greg Edwards (Failure) — photographed with EarthQuaker pedals including the Palisades during album tracking.
• Kyle Shutt (The Sword) — listed as a user on EarthQuaker’s own site.
• Chelsea Wolfe — the Palisades appears in her live rig on video, roughly three and a half minutes into a documented performance clip. (She is also a confirmed Acapulco Gold user.)
• Emma Ruth Rundle — posted the pedal to Instagram as part of her live setup.
• Emily Green (Geese) — the Palisades is visible on her board in a filmed rig walkthrough.
• Dave Depper (Death Cab for Cutie) — quoted calling it “the Platonic Ideal of overdrive,” alongside the Bit Commander and Afterneath.
• Illiterate Light — the pedal is credited on their 2024 album Arches.

The two we are not counting

Two entries on the aggregator do not survive scrutiny and we are flagging them rather than padding the list. Lindsey Jordan (Snail Mail) is listed, but the supporting caption says only that she “uses an EarthQuaker Devices pedal for boost” — the brand is identified, the model is not. Blaster Silonga (IV of Spades) is listed on the basis of a Google image search with no primary source attached. Both may well be true. Neither is verified, and we would rather tell you that than let the roster look longer than it is.

The genre spread, for what it is worth, is real here rather than an artefact of a small sample: Rock 50, Alternative Rock 21, Indie Rock 21, Pop 17, Folk/World/Country 13, Post-Hardcore 8. With 30 documented artists behind it, that distribution is actually informative — this was an indie and alternative rock pedal far more than a metal one.

Tone Recipes: Where To Start On A Pedal With Thirty Starting Points

The single biggest complaint from owners is not about the sound. It is about the paralysis. As one long-term user put it, the Palisades is “more of a knob tweaker than a set-it-and-forget-it pedal.” Several report gravitating to three or four favourite configurations and simply staying there — which is fine, but you should at least know where the good neighbourhoods are. Start from these.

How It Compares

Buying Guide: V1 Versus V2, And The Used Market

Which version to buy

The circuit is the same. The difference is entirely mechanical, and it matters more than you would think. V1 uses hard-click mechanical footswitches — three of them, on a pedal designed to have them stamped on constantly mid-song. Owners have specifically noted that older EarthQuaker switches were prone to failure, and that the V2’s soft-touch relay switches are the more reliable proposition. V2 also adds Flexi-Switch: hold a footswitch for momentary operation, tap it for standard latching. On a boost you use for single-phrase lifts, momentary is genuinely useful.

Buy V2 if you can. V1 is fine if the price is right and you are prepared to have switches replaced eventually.

(One factual note for anyone reading old coverage: at least one outlet reported at the time that Flexi-Switch was made by “a US company based in Ohio.” It is not a third-party component supplier — Flexi-Switch is EarthQuaker’s own trademarked switching behaviour, and EarthQuaker itself is the Ohio company in question.)

What it costs now

With the pedal discontinued, availability has collapsed to the second-hand market. As of September 2026, price-tracking across 600+ retailers turns up the Palisades at exactly one store — Reverb — with the lowest tracked figure at $165. Against a $249 launch price that is a real discount for a hand-built US pedal that has not been improved on, and owners who bought at full price were already calling it “a bargain at $250” given how much it replaced.

Expect that number to drift upward. Discontinued EarthQuaker devices with a reputation do not get cheaper indefinitely.

Who should skip it

If you are a set-and-forget player, this is the wrong pedal and you will resent it. If your board is tight, it will not fit — measure first. If you want one perfect Tube Screamer sound, buy a Tube Screamer. And if you play modern metal, the Palisades is not built for that: it is an overdrive with fuzz-adjacent extremes, not a high-gain distortion, and users have been consistent for a decade that it runs out of aggression before thrash territory. For that, look at a MXR Super Badass or a Pro Co RAT 2.

Living With One: The Honest Ownership Notes

Three real limitations come up again and again from long-term owners, and none of them appear in the marketing copy.

The two gain channels share one volume knob. You can set Gain A and Gain B to wildly different amounts of drive, but you cannot independently set their output levels. Because more gain generally means more perceived volume, switching to channel B will usually be a jump in loudness as well as in dirt — which is often what you want for a lead, and occasionally exactly what you do not want.

The boost is not a standalone boost. It is the output boost of the drive circuit. You cannot bypass the overdrive and use the boost by itself as a clean lift into your amp. If that is what you need, you need a separate boost pedal.

It needs mains power and it needs it clean. There is no battery compartment, and because V2’s switching is relay-based, the pedal will not pass signal at all without power. EarthQuaker is unusually firm on this point: use an isolated, transformer-based pedal supply, not a daisy chain, and do not run it at higher voltages. At 25 mA it is undemanding of the supply itself.

Beyond that, it behaves. The enclosure is the usual EarthQuaker standard — powder-coated steel, printed rather than stickered graphics, built to be stood on. Placement-wise it goes where any overdrive goes: after wah and fuzz, before modulation and time-based effects. Owners have had good results running it into an effects loop as well, and it stacks cooperatively with other drives in both directions.

Frequently Asked Questions

The Verdict That Isn’t A Verdict

The Palisades is what happens when a company that does not want to build a Tube Screamer is finally talked into building one, and decides that if it has to be done, it is going to be done in a way nobody can accuse of being lazy. Thirty base voicings, four footswitchable gain levels, a bass control the original never had, and a footprint that treats your pedalboard like a parking space.

It was never the pedal for the player who wants one good sound. It was the pedal for the player who wants the sound and cannot yet say which one that is — and, judging by the boards it turned up on, for touring guitarists who needed four sounds under one foot and did not want to carry four boxes. Albert Hammond Jr had one within months of launch. Dave Catching used it for solo boosts across an EODM tour and an album. Ilan Rubin called it phenomenal in EarthQuaker’s own interview.

And now it is gone, replaced in the catalogue by a pedal that costs a third as much and does a third as much. That is not a tragedy — the Plumes is excellent, and most players genuinely do not need thirty voicings. But the Palisades was the most ambitious answer anyone has given to the most over-answered question in guitar, and there is nothing quite like it on a shelf today. If you find a V2 in good condition for sensible money, that is not a bad afternoon’s work.