EHX have announced a new pedal that's apparently their take on the Klon:
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EHX wrote:Tone aficionados kept telling EHX’s Mike Matthews about a pedal that had achieved a lot of buzz because it was only obtainable at an exorbitant price. That pedal was the KLON CENTAUR.
A believer in bringing great tools to starving musicians, Mike tasked his trusty team to create an affordable alternative, and that is how the SOUL FOOD was cooked up.
The SOUL FOOD delivers transparent overdrive with great touch and response. Its circuitry features boosted power rails to provide abundant headroom and increased definition. Best of all, you don’t have to be a rock star to own one!
Fran wrote:I love how this place is basic as fuck.
ekwatts wrote:I'm just going to smash it in with a hammer and hope it works. Tone is all in the fingers anyway.
Can't anyone get those tones with a decent tube amp and overdrive?
Why are we still making new pedals that do the same things?
THIS.
And yes, you can get Klon tones from a decent tube amp and overdrive, even sometimes just the natural drive of the amp itself will get into that territory. Hype is hype, I guess.
Edit: I find my fulltone OCD comes VERY VERY close to this as well. Klon is all hype.
I don't know that it is all hype. While I don't have an official Klon, I have two clone pedals that use the same components and such and I really like them. I have a bunch of overdrive pedals as well that are good, but they are different than the Klon. I would never pay that huge price for one, but it is a nice pedal. I got mine in trades and such.
My tube amps are pretty loud, so turning them up to the point where they naturally overdrive isn't really realistic for my setup. Plus my favorite amps that I have are designed to go loud and clean. (Twin and Showman) I like the ability to play loud and clean, so I use pedals to color the sound when I need a little bit of dirt or distortion. My Klon is often just on so if I dig in a bit, it overdrives mildly or if I mess with my volume. My other overdrives are pretty much a stock level. Quiet playing is the same sound as loud playing, just volume changes vs amount of overdrive.
That is just my two cents. I really enjoy the pedal for what it does.
I don't know legal stuff well, but I imagine if they couldn't legally say it was a klon style pedal, they wouldn't. Maybe the name Klon isn't trademarked or something? Maybe if it was trademarked, it isn't currently?
The bigger thing here is that EHX, a GIANT in the industry (with what? 40 years of innovation behind them?) is now ripping off a small time builder. And admitting to it as publicly as possible. Weak Sauce.
They didn't really say it was a clone either, just a good affordable alternative to a Klon Centaur.
A believer in bringing great tools to starving musicians, Mike tasked his trusty team to create an affordable alternative, and that is how the SOUL FOOD was cooked up.
That's the way I took it, too. Huge business notices small business doing well out of something. What happens then? Capitalism.
Why does the Klon get all the props it gets? Because it's handmade, it's somewhat unique and so on. The mass-produced EHX version is allowing little Jimmy who goes to Guitar Center with his dad to buy a distortion pedal the chance to get something close to that sound, too. They're basically the same thing, but aimed at different ends of the market. The sort of people who buy boo-teek pedals will carry on buying boo-teek pedals.
I'd like to try the whole Klon thing, too, but I've never been comfortable spending £100+ on a distortion. To be honest, I'm not a fan of spending £50+ on a distortion. So I'd definitely be looking at it seriously if the price is decent. If I get hooked on it then who knows, I'll probably try a "proper" one. It doesn't strike me as being the same as the recent Danelectro Cool Cat rip-off controversy; this is a bit more obvious. They're owning up to the inspiration directly in the literature, so it's at least a bit more of an "honest" rip-off. No idea if that makes it any better. Probably not.
I doubt this is going to do anything to dent the mythology surrounding the original pedal. It might even add to it.
For low drive, a bog standard TS does the job more than adequately (for me). At lower drive, so much more of the TONEZ comes from your actual playing. It's higher gain sounds where the differentiation in pedals come in. I very much want to have a blast on one of the new minifoogers.
aen wrote:The bigger thing here is that EHX, a GIANT in the industry (with what? 40 years of innovation behind them?) is now ripping off a small time builder. And admitting to it as publicly as possible. Weak Sauce.
& loads of 'small time/big time' builders make money building muffs or variants of.
10 pages worth already!
