There is a three-trunked war elephant on the front of this pedal. It is wearing plate armour and it is charging. Walrus Audio’s illustrators have never been subtle about announcing what a box is for, and the Ages announces something specific: this is not a delicate, transparent, get-out-of-the-way overdrive. This is a thing that arrives with weight behind it.
The Walrus Audio Ages Five-State Overdrive landed in May 2020 and it landed with a confession attached. “We haven’t released an overdrive since 2016,” Walrus wrote on the product page, “and with there being more overdrives out there than stars in the sky, we didn’t want to create another one unless we thought it was important.” That is a company from Oklahoma City admitting, in public, that the overdrive market is saturated to the point of absurdity — and then releasing an overdrive anyway. The Ages is the argument for why they bothered.
The pitch has three legs. Five internally switched gain-and-clipping states on a rotary knob. A dry blend control that runs a parallel clean path alongside the drive. And a bass control wired before the gain stage rather than after it. Individually, none of those is unheard of. Together, in one enclosure, at a street price that started at $199, they add up to a pedal that behaves less like a single overdrive and more like a small cabinet of them.
Dave Hunter reviewed it for Premier Guitar in September 2020 and closed with a line that has followed the pedal around ever since: “chances are, you’ll pick a setting, play it, and smile.” That is both a compliment and, if you read it a certain way, the pedal’s central problem. We will get to both.
The Four-Year Silence: Why Walrus Waited
Walrus Audio started building pedals in Oklahoma City in 2011. By the middle of the 2010s the company had a reputation built almost entirely on ambience and modulation — the Julia chorus, the Descent reverb, the ARP-87 delay. Dirt was a smaller part of the story: the Iron Horse LM308 distortion arrived in 2012, the Voyager preamp/overdrive and the 385 followed, and then the drive catalogue simply stopped growing.
Four years is a long time in the pedal industry, and it is a particularly long time in overdrive, where the release cycle is relentless and mostly consists of Tube Screamer variations with different names. Walrus’s stated reason for the pause — that they refused to add another green box to the pile without a reason — is the kind of thing every company says. What makes it credible in this case is what the Ages actually contains, because it is conspicuously not a Tube Screamer clone. It has TS DNA in its midrange, which Hunter noted plainly, but the architecture underneath is different enough that the comparison breaks down within about thirty seconds of playing.
The Ages also turned out to be the opening move in a trilogy. The Eras Five-State Distortion followed in 2021 and the Eons Five-State Fuzz completed the set in 2022, each applying the same five-position rotary architecture to a different gain territory. That is unusual. Most companies build one multi-mode box and move on. Walrus built a design language and then used it three times.
What The Five States Actually Are
The mode knob is a five-position rotary switch, and the states are arranged in ascending gain order. Each position combines an internal gain structure — low or high — with a clipping arrangement. Walrus’s own descriptions are short enough to quote in full, and they are more accurate than most manufacturer copy.
State I — Low gain, symmetric silicon soft clipping
Described by Walrus as “compressed and smooth.” In practice this is the most polite the Ages ever gets, and it is best understood as a boost with a personality rather than as an overdrive. There is noticeable compression here — the pick attack gets rounded off and the note bodies get slightly fatter. It is not a transparent boost and it does not pretend to be. Premier Guitar characterised the first two positions as “subtly different flavors of boost,” both “more textured and fattening than linear or transparent,” and that is exactly right.
State II — Low gain, symmetric LED soft clipping
“Pushed, open, and sparkly.” LEDs have a higher forward voltage than silicon diodes, which means they clip later and leave more headroom before the signal starts to round off. The audible result is that State II is louder, more open and less squashed than State I at the same gain setting. Where I compresses, II shimmers. If you want the Ages to behave like a clean boost that adds a little high-end excitement, this is the position.
State III — High gain, symmetric silicon soft clipping
“Increased saturation and tight.” This is where the Ages stops boosting and starts overdriving. It is the tightest of the five states in the low end, which makes it the most useful for riffing with humbuckers where a looser drive would turn palm mutes into mush. Hunter’s assessment — “proper overdrive happens at position 3” — is the single most useful sentence written about the pedal.
State IV — High gain, symmetric LED soft clipping
“Saturated, punchy and big.” The high-gain counterpart to State II, and for a lot of players this is the money position. LEDs’ higher clipping threshold means more of the signal’s dynamic range survives before the diodes take over, so State IV is both louder and more responsive to picking than State III while carrying more apparent saturation. Lead players tend to end up here.
State V — High gain, symmetric silicon hard clipping
“Heavy compression, thick and chewy.” This is the only state that uses hard clipping — the diodes are placed to shunt the signal to ground rather than in the amplifier’s feedback loop — and it is audibly a different kind of distortion. The sustain jumps, the dynamics flatten, and the pedal starts to behave like a distortion box rather than an overdrive. One Walrus customer described the range as running “from Fender style crunch on 1 to full on Marshall sounds on mode 5,” which is a fair sketch even if it undersells how much the other controls move the goalposts.
The important structural point: these are not five different circuits. They are five combinations of internal gain and clipping topology applied to the same fundamental voice. That is why the pedal holds together as an instrument rather than sounding like five unrelated pedals in one box. It is also why some players report that the differences between adjacent modes are less dramatic than the marketing implies — Guitar World’s review noted that “the subtle differences between modes may not be immediately apparent to all players.” Both things are true. The core voice is consistent by design.
The Dry Knob Is The Real Feature
If you only take one thing away from this article, take this: the mode switch gets the headline, but the Dry control is what makes the Ages genuinely different from its competition.
The Ages runs a parallel-path topology. Your clean signal is split off before the gain stage and reintroduced at the output, blended in by the Dry knob. This is standard practice on bass overdrives and on studio outboard, and it is comparatively rare on guitar drives, where the usual approach is to run everything through the clipping stage and hope the circuit is transparent enough.
What it buys you is control over articulation independent of gain. On a conventional overdrive, if you want more pick attack you turn the gain down, which also changes the amount of saturation. On the Ages you can leave the gain wherever it sounds best and dial in as much or as little clean attack as the arrangement needs. Premier Guitar identified this as the pedal’s genuine innovation: the Dry knob “helps shape the output in very specific ways to suit a band mix or song arrangement — and makes the Ages exponentially more versatile.”
Practical consequences worth knowing:
- Dry at zero is the pedal in its most compressed, most conventional-overdrive form. Thick, but the pick attack gets buried.
- Dry around 9 to 11 o’clock is where most players live. Enough clean signal to keep chord definition, not enough to thin the drive out.
- Dry past noon starts producing an amp-like sound where the drive functions as harmonic seasoning rather than as the primary voice. Excellent for chording under a vocal.
- Dry near maximum with a high gain setting is the closest the Ages gets to a genuinely transparent drive, because you are hearing mostly your own signal with saturation layered underneath.
There is a caveat: blending a clean path with a clipped path creates the possibility of phase interaction, and on some rigs a certain Dry setting will produce a mild low-mid scoop. It is not severe and most players never notice it, but if a particular setting sounds hollow rather than full, move the Dry knob rather than reaching for the EQ.
The Bass Control Sits Before The Gain Stage
The second unusual design decision. On most drive pedals the tone stack is after the clipping — you distort the signal, then you shape what came out. On the Ages, the Bass control is a boost/cut that hits the signal before it hits the overdrive.
This changes what the control does. Cutting bass pre-gain does not just remove low end from the output; it removes low end from what the diodes are being asked to clip, which tightens the whole distortion and reduces intermodulation mud. Boosting bass pre-gain does the reverse — it feeds the clipping stage more low-frequency energy and produces a fatter, looser, more saturated result across the whole spectrum, not just at the bottom.
For anyone who has spent years wrestling with the fixed bass cut on a Tube Screamer, this is a revelation. The TS’s famous mid-hump exists largely because the circuit rolls off low end before clipping to keep things tight. The Ages gives you that same tool as a variable control, which means you can have the TS’s tightness when you want it and a full-range, chest-thumping drive when you do not.
The Treble control, by contrast, is conventional and post-gain — unity at noon, cutting highs counterclockwise and adding them clockwise. It exists to tame the top end of the LED states, which can get bright, and it does that job without drama.
Specifications
Famous Players: An Honest Accounting
Here is where a lot of gear writing goes wrong, so let us be direct about it.
The Ages has no signature artist, no Premier Guitar Rig Rundown appearance, and no first-party endorsement campaign. Walrus has never built the pedal’s marketing around a name. What exists instead is a documented but modest roster of working players, assembled from photographs, tour-gear videos and social posts. That roster is real and worth going through — but it is Tier-2 evidence, crowd-sourced and photo-based, and it deserves to be labelled as such rather than dressed up as an endorsement list.
David Ryan Harris
The best-documented user. Harris is a solo artist and songwriter who has spent years as a touring and backing guitarist in the orbit of John Mayer and Nick Jonas, and an Instagram post from January 2021 shows a rebuilt pedalboard with the Ages on it. This is exactly the player profile the pedal suits: a sideman working across multiple artists and genres who needs one drive that can do several jobs credibly rather than one job perfectly.
Josh Rand
The Stone Sour guitarist was photographed with the Ages shortly after release, holding a new unit. That is a heavier context than the pedal is usually associated with, and it is a reasonable reminder that States IV and V are considerably more aggressive than the “overdrive” label implies. One customer review on Walrus’s own site consists, in its entirety, of the words “Very good pedal to play megadeth.” Walrus’s reply — “Get your metal fix!” — suggests they are aware.
Mercedes Arn-Horn
The Softcult guitarist and vocalist discussed the Ages in a Digital Tour Bus Gear Masters episode. Softcult’s sound is shoegaze-adjacent — layered, textural, more concerned with density than with articulation — and an overdrive with a variable pre-gain bass control and a blend knob is a genuinely sensible tool for that. Arn-Horn also appears in the documented user list for the EarthQuaker Devices Hizumitas, which places her firmly in the boutique-dirt world.
Tell Chang
Guitarist for the Taiwanese math-rock trio Elephant Gym, documented via a pedalboard photograph. The band’s music is clean-forward, intricate and dynamically sensitive, which makes the low-gain LED state and a high Dry setting an obvious fit.
The rest of the documented list
Also photographed or filmed with the Ages: Bad Snacks (producer and multi-instrumentalist, seen with both the Ages and the Walrus Iron Horse in a studio video), Hakan Özoğuz of the Turkish band Athena, Richie Nobrega Jr. of ØM-53, and Norwegian guitarist Eirik Stordrange. None of these is a household name and none constitutes an endorsement. What the list collectively demonstrates is the pedal’s actual constituency: working guitarists across pop, metal, shoegaze, math rock and studio production, none of whom bought it for a specific famous sound.
Who is definitely not an Ages player
Because this article is going to talk about Tube Screamers and transparent drives, it is worth stating plainly: Stevie Ray Vaughan, Eric Johnson, John Frusciante, Mark Knopfler, Joe Bonamassa, Jimmy Page, Nels Cline and Billie Joe Armstrong appear in this article as reference points for drive tones and circuit families only. None of them has been documented using a Walrus Audio Ages. When we say a given setting lands “in Tube Screamer territory,” we mean the circuit family, not the player.
Tone Recipes And Settings
Transparent-ish clean boost
Mode II, Gain 8 o’clock, Dry 2 o’clock, Bass noon, Treble 11 o’clock, Volume to taste above unity. This is the Ages doing the least it can do — a level lift with a little sparkle and enough of your dry signal to keep the amp’s own character intact. Excellent in front of an already-breaking-up amp.
Tube Screamer substitute
Mode III, Gain 1 o’clock, Dry 9 o’clock, Bass 9 o’clock, Treble 1 o’clock, Volume to taste. Cutting the pre-gain bass is what creates the TS-style mid-forward tightness. This lands close enough to an Ibanez TS9 or TS808 to work as a stand-in for most gigs, with the advantage that you can undo the bass cut at any moment.
Full-range rhythm crunch for humbuckers
Mode III, Gain noon, Dry 11 o’clock, Bass 2 o’clock, Treble noon. The opposite of the recipe above: pre-gain bass boost feeds the clipping stage more low end, producing a thicker, more amp-like crunch without losing the tightness that Mode III’s silicon soft clipping provides. This is the setting that makes the Ages sound like a small cranked combo.
Singing lead
Mode IV, Gain 2 o’clock, Dry 10 o’clock, Bass 1 o’clock, Treble 1 o’clock, Volume well above unity. The LED clipping keeps the note articulate as it sustains rather than collapsing into compression. Add a touch more Dry if the notes disappear in a dense mix.
Chewy, compressed, riff-oriented
Mode V, Gain 2 o’clock, Dry 8 o’clock, Bass 10 o’clock, Treble noon. Hard clipping plus a modest pre-gain bass cut keeps this from turning into porridge while retaining the heavy compression. This is the closest the Ages gets to a distortion pedal and the setting Josh Rand’s presence on the roster makes sense of.
Stacked in front of another drive
Mode I or II, Gain 9 o’clock, Dry noon, Bass 10 o’clock, Treble noon, Volume slightly above unity, running into a second dirt box. The low-gain states are specifically good at this because they add texture and level without imposing much of their own EQ curve. Walrus’s own copy says the Ages “stacks well with other drives,” and this is the configuration they mean.
Bass guitar
Mode III, Gain 11 o’clock, Dry 1 o’clock, Bass noon, Treble 10 o’clock. The parallel dry path is what makes the Ages viable on bass at all — it preserves the fundamental while the drive path adds grind on top. Multiple bassists have reported success with it, and the design logic supports them: this is exactly how dedicated bass overdrives are built.
All settings are clock positions. Volume is always the last thing you set, because every mode change alters the output level and you will need to re-balance.
How The Ages Compares
Against the Tube Screamer family
The TS9 and TS808 do one thing with total authority: a mid-hump, a bass cut, a compressed and vocal midrange. The Ages can approximate that from Mode III with the bass cut in, and Premier Guitar heard “hints of Tube Screamer” in the core voice. What it cannot do is be a TS with a TS’s simplicity — three knobs and no decisions. What the TS cannot do is anything else. The Boss SD-1‘s asymmetric clipping puts it in a different flavour bracket again, and at a fraction of the price.
Against the transparent-drive school
The Klon Centaur, the Analog Man King of Tone, the MXR Timmy, the Nobels ODR-1 and the Greer Lightspeed all exist to add gain while changing your fundamental tone as little as possible. The Ages is philosophically opposed to this. Even in its lowest states it is “more textured and fattening than linear or transparent,” in Hunter’s phrase. If your priority is hearing your amp with more gain, buy one of those instead. If your priority is a pedal with an opinion that you can steer, the Ages is the better tool — and its Dry knob is a more precise instrument for controlling perceived transparency than any of the above.
Against the other multi-mode overdrives
This is the Ages’ real competitive set. The EarthQuaker Devices Plumes is the price-conscious rival: a three-mode TS-derived circuit at a third of the cost, brilliantly executed but far narrower. The Boss JB-2 Angry Driver combines two complete circuits with a blend between them, which is a different solution to the same problem. The Keeley D&M Drive offers two independent voices in series. The Fulltone Fulldrive 2 MOSFET and the Fulltone OCD use toggles to swap clipping arrangements much as the Ages does with a rotary.
The Ages beats all of them on sheer range and on tonal fine-adjustment. It loses to all of them on immediacy. Hunter identified this precisely: with a multi-mode drive “you may be tempted to stick with a single mode in performance rather than constantly flick between modes in the middle of a tune. That can make you feel like you’re underutilizing the many available options.” Guitar.com made the related point that switching modes typically requires recalibrating the other controls, because output level and EQ balance shift between states. Neither is a fault exactly. Both are real.
Against its Walrus siblings
Walrus’s dirt line is unusually well-differentiated. The 385 Overdrive MKII is the amp-in-a-box — inspired by the Bell & Howell Filmosound 385 projector, tube-like and simple, with an A/B switch and a 385+ boost for saturation. The Iron Horse V3 is the LM308 distortion, louder and more single-minded. The Eras Five-State Distortion is the Ages’ architecture applied to distortion rather than overdrive, and is the obvious choice if the Ages’ Mode V is where you always end up. The Eons Five-State Fuzz completes the trilogy. The Voyager is the preamp/overdrive.
If you are building a full Walrus board, the natural chain is the Ages into the Julia Analog Chorus/Vibrato, then the ARP-87 Multi-Function Delay, then the Slö Multi Texture Reverb or Fathom Reverb, with the Monument V2 Harmonic Tap Tremolo wherever you prefer your tremolo. If you are going direct to a desk or interface, the Mako ACS1 Amp + Cab Simulator is what goes at the end.
Buying Guide
Is it still in production? Yes. As of September 2026 the Ages is a current Core Series product on Walrus Audio’s site, listed at $249.99 with a $212.49 sale price and available in the standard olive green and a black “Minimal” colourway. It has not appeared on the discontinued page.
New or used? The used market sits roughly in the $115–160 range, which is a substantial saving. There are no known reliability problems with the design and no version changes to be wary of — the Ages has not had a V2. The main argument for buying new is the limited lifetime warranty, which Walrus honours and which is a genuine part of the value proposition on a $250 pedal. Note that warranties on boutique pedals are usually original-owner only, so confirm before assuming coverage transfers.
Colourways. Walrus periodically releases limited-edition finishes of its Core Series pedals, and these can command a premium on the used market that has nothing to do with how the pedal sounds. If you are buying to play rather than to collect, ignore them entirely and buy whichever is cheapest.
Who should buy it. Working guitarists who cover multiple styles in one night. Studio players who want one drive that can be several. Anyone who has bought four overdrives in three years and would like to stop. Bassists who want a guitar-voiced drive with a usable clean blend.
Who should not. Players who want one sound and want it immediately. Anyone who finds a five-knob-plus-rotary interface stressful mid-set. Purists after a specific vintage circuit — buy the actual pedal that has that circuit. And anyone on a tight budget, because the Plumes gets you most of the way for a third of the money.
Ownership Notes
Power. 9V DC, centre negative, 100mA minimum. There is no battery compartment — this is a mains-only pedal. Walrus specifically recommends an isolated supply and explicitly advises against daisy-chaining, which is not boilerplate: the parallel dry path makes the circuit somewhat more susceptible to supply noise than a simple series overdrive, and a shared ground with a digital delay is a reliable way to introduce whine.
Footprint. At 2.62 x 4.77 inches this is a standard Walrus Core enclosure — wider than a Boss compact, narrower than a two-switch box. Top-mounted jacks mean it can sit flush against a pedalboard’s back rail, which recovers most of the extra width.
Bypass. True bypass, which means no buffering when the pedal is off. On a large board with long cable runs you will want a buffer somewhere in the chain; the Ages will not provide it.
Level matching between modes. The single most-cited ergonomic complaint. Because the five states have different internal gain structures, output level shifts noticeably as you rotate the mode knob. There is no per-mode level trim. If you intend to change modes mid-song you will need to compensate with the Volume knob at the same time, which is a two-hand operation. Most players choose a mode before the set and leave it alone. Plan accordingly.
Placement. Standard drive position — after wah and compression, before modulation, delay and reverb. If you are stacking, the Ages sounds better as the first drive with a lower-gain box after it than the reverse, because its parallel clean path is doing work that a second pedal’s clipping stage will otherwise undo.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is the Walrus Audio Ages a Tube Screamer clone?
No. There is Tube Screamer character in its core midrange, and Premier Guitar noted “hints of Tube Screamer” in the fundamental voice, but the architecture is different: a parallel dry path, a pre-gain bass control, and five switchable gain-and-clipping states rather than one fixed arrangement. It can imitate a TS from Mode III with the bass rolled off. It is not built on the TS circuit.
What is the difference between the Ages, the Eras and the Eons?
They are the same five-state design language applied to three different gain territories. The Ages (2020) is the overdrive, the Eras (2021) is the distortion, and the Eons (2022) is the fuzz. If you consistently end up in the Ages’ hardest-clipping Mode V, the Eras is probably the pedal you actually wanted.
Can I switch modes with my foot?
No. The mode selector is a rotary knob, not a footswitchable function, and there is no expression or MIDI control. This is the pedal’s main practical limitation for live use and the one thing Premier Guitar’s reviewer explicitly wished were different: “the ability to more readily switch between the clipping variations would really maximize the Ages’ potential.”
Does the Ages work on bass?
Yes, and unusually well for a guitar-voiced drive. The parallel dry path preserves the low fundamental while the drive path adds grind on top, which is precisely how purpose-built bass overdrives are designed. Bassists have reported it as a successful analogue replacement for multi-FX drive patches. Set the Dry knob past noon and keep Treble below noon as a starting point.
What does the Dry knob actually do?
It blends in an unaffected copy of your input signal, split off before the gain stage and recombined at the output. Practically, it controls how much clean pick attack and articulation survives alongside the saturation, and it does so independently of the Gain control. It is the pedal’s most useful control and the one most people underuse.
Why is the Bass control before the gain stage?
Because shaping low end before clipping changes the character of the distortion itself rather than just filtering the result. Cutting bass pre-gain tightens the whole drive and reduces intermodulation mud — the same principle behind the Tube Screamer’s fixed low-end roll-off. Boosting it feeds the clipping stage more energy and produces a fatter, looser saturation. The Treble control, by contrast, is conventional and post-gain.
Is the Ages discontinued?
No. It remains a current Core Series product as of September 2026, in both the original olive green and a black Minimal finish, and it carries Walrus Audio’s limited lifetime warranty.
Does the Ages need an isolated power supply?
Walrus recommends one and advises against daisy-chaining. It draws a minimum of 100mA at 9V DC centre negative and has no battery option. Given the parallel-path topology’s sensitivity to supply noise, this is advice worth following rather than a liability disclaimer.
Which mode should I start on?
Mode III. It is the first position that produces genuine overdrive rather than boost, it is the tightest of the high-gain states, and it is the most neutral starting point from which to decide whether you want more openness (go to IV) or more compression (go to V). Set Gain to noon, Dry to 10 o’clock, Bass and Treble at noon, and adjust from there.
The Verdict, Such As It Is
The Ages is a pedal that rewards the kind of player who enjoys building a sound and frustrates the kind who wants to find one. It is not the most immediate overdrive on the market and it is not the cheapest. What it is, six years after release and still in production, is one of the few multi-mode drives whose modes are genuinely useful across their whole range rather than existing to pad a feature list — and the Dry knob remains a better idea than most of what the overdrive market has produced since.
Walrus said they would not release another overdrive unless they thought it was important. On the evidence, they were entitled to the confidence. The armoured elephant on the front is charging at a market that did not need another overdrive, and it got through anyway.