Ceriatone Overtone Special

Ceriatone Overtone Special

Of course, the Ceriatone Overtone Special is not a US-made amp but it comes from Asia. Nevertheless, it is based on, or cloned from the famous, ultra-rare and extremely expensive Dumble Overdrive Special. Ceriatone offers many kits to build faithful high-quality copies of famous amplifiers, and it also sell fully assembled amplifiers like this one. In our case, the manufacturing quality is very high with a very clean layout and good solder joints (The main issue of this amplifier was a damaged output jack).

The Dumble ODS being so rare, it is very difficult to determine if the Ceriatone is faithful to its inspiration from an aural point of view. Nevertheless, the amp offers many high-quality tones. The cleans are definitely and logically in the Fender Blackface camp with extended possibilities in the equalization domain thanks to the voicing switches. The Jazz position ensures maximum headroom and reduced highs and lows but with a nice attack to the notes. Selecting the Rock voicing expands the frequency spectrum and brings more slightly aggressive mids. Swiching on the overdrive mode, the tone remains fairly bright whatever the eq settings (the overdrive is generated post-eq) and can only be tamed partially with the presence control: some Dumble included and brightness control for this mode. The ODS has a signature tone that cannot really be compared to any other amplifiers. To get the most out of it, it is necessary to push the power amp which will result in the smoothing of the overall tone. In this case, the amp provides a plethora of high-quality tones from clean to very saturated tones. While it is often said that any style can be played with an ODS, I believe that the Ceriatone Overtone is a great amp for modern blues, jazz and traditional rock.