Paul Cochrane Timmy overdrive

History:

Paul Cochrane is a guitar pedal builder and musician living in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. He does not publicize very much information about himself. He doesn’t have a website and hasn’t done interviews. He just builds pedals by hand out of his home and lets the quality of the pedal create the reputation.

“Believe it or not the main reason I don’t have a real web site is that I know people are turned off by the talk of my product. I don’t want to do anything to be seen as feeding the “hype” since I know so many are turned off by that stuff.” -PaulC, Jan 20, 2013

Cochrane started making an overdrive pedal called the “Tim” in 1997. It was in a wide box with a footswitch for boost and a footswitch for drive. He created the Tim to give his non-master-volume Marshall amp a cranked up sound at a lower stage volume. He named the pedal after Tim the Enchanter from Monty Python.

In 2004 he refined the Tim into a smaller version with only the drive footswitch, and he called it the “Timmy”. The Timmy was sold exclusively through Cochrane’s MySpace page for many years. He eventually made pedals for dealers in addition to the MySpace page, and in the 2010s almost all of his sales were through dealers, letting him concentrate on making the pedals.

The Tim and the Timmy are the only two pedals Paul has ever produced.

In 2010 Cochrane added a clipping switch to the outside of the Timmy (the circuit remained unchanged). This became known as the Timmy V2, and the original Timmy without the switch became known as the Timmy V1.

Not long after the change to V2, Cochrane started offering the Timmy in different colors if dealers ordered a big batch and wanted them in special color for their store. Up until then every Tim and Timmy was made in a purple “bowling ball” swirl finish. Now you can find Timmy pedals in seafoam green, blue, red, white, black, silver, sparkle variants of these colors, as well as with different colored text and different colored knobs.

In 2019 Paul Cochrane released a new “version 3” of the Timmy pedal for its 15th anniversary, and stopped making the V2. The Timmy V3 changed the clipping switch into a boost switch, and has a few other differences that are explained in the Specs section further down this page.

Not long after the V3 came out, Cochrane and MXR announced a partnership that allowed MXR to create and sell “mini” Timmy pedals. The design was approved by Cochrane and he licensed the name so the pedals could be produced and distributed by a much larger company and be more available to guitar players around the world.

As of this writing (Dec. 10, 2020) Paul still hand makes Timmy V3 pedals from his Murfreesboro home, and the MXR Timmy mini is available in guitar stores all over the world.

One other thing worth noting about the Timmy is the price. Cochrane initially sold the Timmy for $100 plus $5 shipping. Even with the long waiting lists (Cochrane didn’t ask people for down payments, by the way) and other overdrives selling for 2 or 3 times as much, Cochrane kept the price at $100, which he thought was fair for an overdrive pedal. Used Timmy pedals regularly sold for $200 on eBay because the demand was so high. In 2009 he raised the price to $129 because buying parts had gotten a little more expensive, and he kept the price there for 10 years. Many guitarists recognized Paul Cochrane’s Timmy as an unprecedented value in the world of guitar effects.

Use:

Overdrive pedals give players different options for tones. If the straight-into-the-amp sound is good, then a good overdrive pedal can build on that and make the tone better suited for a thick rhythm or a cutting solo. The Timmy is widely regarded as one of the best at building on what the guitar amp is doing. The circuit doesn’t impart much of its own character to the sound. It adds saturation in a way that is believable, as if the amp’s gain knob was turned up.

The Gain knob increases the overdrive as you turn it up. The Volume knob increases the output volume as you turn it up. Generally, the higher the Gain knob, the lower the volume knob should be if the goal is to maintain a similar overall level whether the pedal is on or off. The Treble and Bass knobs control the amount of highs and lows in the sound, but are wired backwards so turning them “down” (counter-clockwise) actually increases the treble/bass. The V1, V2, and MXR Timmy pedals all behave this way. The V3 flips it so the treble and bass increase when you turn the knobs “up” (clockwise).

JT used a Timmy V1 in the ’00s when he would bring a powered board with only a volume pedal and tuner on it, then grab pedals from a tupperware bin and put them on the board as needed. When JT had his big Trailer Trash board made in 2009, the Timmy V1 was one of the overdrives that was chosen to be on it. This board was on almost all of JT’s big sessions from mid 2009 through late 2017 when his big XTS board was made. The big XTS board had a sparkle blue Timmy V2 on it. The Timmy is the only overdrive pedal on both the Trailer Trash board and the big XTS board.

You can see JT using his Timmy V1 on a guitar solo in a session here (the finished version of the song is here). In the clip he is playing his Blue Tele into his Timmy V1, MXR Carbon Copy delay, and Carr Viceroy head. The Volume knob is at noon and all other knobs are at 11 o’clock.

Specs:

Timmy V2 Volume differences:
According to Paul Cochrane, the Timmy was originally designed so the pedal would have unity gain (same overall level to the amp whether the pedal is on or off) when the gain, bass, and treble knobs were at noon and the volume knob was at 2 o’clock. That continued unchanged for V2 Timmy pedals until 2015, when Paul changed the taper of the volume knob so unity gain was achieved with all 4 knobs at noon. Minimum and maximum positions are the same, but the sweep is different for Timmy V2 pedals made from 2015-2019 (when V3 was released and V2 was retired). To replicate settings from a V1 Timmy on a ’15-’19 V2 Timmy, the volume knob will have to be turned down slightly lower on the V2 than where it would be on a V1. The MXR Timmy has the V1 style sweep where unity is achieved with gain, bass, and treble at noon and volume at 2 o’clock.

Chip differences:
There have been some Timmy pedals with a different IC chip than the original V1. It makes at most a very small difference, but for the sake of accuracy should be talked about here.

The original Timmy V1 always had a JRC4559 chip providing the gain for the signal. It was also the stock chip in the Timmy V2. For the early custom colored Timmy V2 pedals sold through dealers, though, Paul used an LM1458 chip that sounded slightly “smoother”. By mid 2012 all Timmy pedals were back to the JRC4559 chip.

From the beginning, all Timmy pedals had the chips in “sockets” on the circuit board. In other words, the chips weren’t permanently attached. With no electronics experience needed, any person could open up the pedal, pull the chip out, and put a different chip in as easily as putting together Lego pieces. The JRC4559 and LM1458 each cost about $1, so there is no difference in value between a Timmy V2 with one chip vs the other.

Dip Switches:
The Timmy V1 had a pair of dip switches on the inside of the pedal. These switches controlled which diodes were in the clipping circuit, which affects the charcacter of the distortion.

No switches up = least distorted, least compressed, symetrical clipping. This is the stock setting.

One switch up = slightly more distorted and compressed, with asymmetrical clipping (one side of the waveform is clipped harder than the other).

Both switches up = most distorted, most compressed setting, but still symmetrical clipping.

The difference in sound between these settings is actually quite small, but changing the clipping mode could be useful for very fine tuning.

The only change from V1 to V2, is the V2 has a toggle switch on the outside where if the switch is in the middle it’s the stock setting, up is asymmetrical clipping, and down is the more distorted symmetrical clipping. It’s the same as the dip switches, but more convenient.

For V3 of the Timmy, Cochrane made the toggle switch into a boost and relegated the clipping modes back to internal dip switches. The gain range on the gain knob was reduced so it works better with the boost switch up and down (more space in the sweep to dial in the amount of distortion you want). The Bass and Treble knobs were “corrected” from their original reversed directions so when you turn the bass/treble knobs “up” you get more bass/treble instead of less bass/treble. And the LM1458 chip that Cochrane thought was “smoother” was brought back for this version, replacing the original JRC4559 chip.

To summarize version differences:

Timmy V1 = purple, no toggle switch.

Timmy V2 = many different colors, clippling mode toggle switch, some 2010-2012 non-purple ones have a “smoother” sounding chip.

Timmy V3 = blue, toggle switch is a gain boost, gain knob has smaller range for finer adjustments, and it has the “smoother” sounding chip.