01—JHS Pedals
Bonsai
Settling the 'which Tube Screamer is best?' argument in a single box.
If you've ever wondered whether the TS808 really sounds different from the TS9, buy this and stop wondering. Probably the most useful 'multi' on the market.
02—On the bench
Nine Tube Screamers in one enclosure. Bonsai is a meticulously modeled rotary-switch overdrive that recreates nine distinct flavors of the TS-808 / TS-9 lineage: the original 808, the TS9, the Keeley Mod Plus, the Maxon OD-9, the Exar OD-1, the JHS Strong Mod, the Boss SD-1, the Ibanez TS10, and the MetalZone-into-itself trick. Each setting nails the gain structure, EQ curve, and clipping character of the original. The point isn't to replace your collection of green boxes — it's to A/B the differences in one pedal and find which Tube Screamer you actually like before you spend $400 on a vintage one. The same three knobs (drive, tone, level) work across all nine modes.
- 01nine distinct mid-hump voices, all faithful
- 02TS808 mode is the warmest and most compressed
- 03Keeley Plus mode has the most open low end
- 04MetalZone mode is the surprise — useful as a fuzz
- 05great as a Klon-style boost into a dirty amp
03—Contested claims · 2
Where readers pushed back.
@jasonJun 23 “Pick a mode for the band you're in that night, leave gain at 2 o'clock, never think about it again.”
The romance of commitment has a sticker price. The Bonsai is $229. Committing separately runs a $179 TS808 reissue, a $229 Keeley-modded Screamer, and an OD-1 that starts around $350 used on a good day — call it $750 and three power-supply slots to hold opinions you will use one at a time anyway. The rotary knob is not an identity crisis; it is a settings menu, and like every settings menu it gets touched once at rehearsal and never again. Mine has sat in TS9 mode for over a year, which is commitment by any definition, with eight exits I paid nothing extra for. The forty-minute guy would have burned that same clock swapping physical pedals — with cables involved, and the amp on.
@JohnnyJun 23 “Pick a mode for the band you're in that night, leave gain at 2 o'clock, never think about it again.”
Nine Tube Screamers in one box is not curation — it is a hedge, and this masthead has a standing rule about hedges. A pedal with nine opinions has none. The TS808 that made this circuit famous is all over Texas Flood because Stevie Ray plugged into one sound and drove it like a stolen car; nobody ever earned a tone by auditioning voicings. I watched a session guitarist burn forty minutes of studio clock on that rotary knob last winter — nine modes, nine almosts, zero takes. The old record-store rule applies: the reissue that offers every version of the thing counts as no version of the thing. Buy the mode you would actually keep. If it is the Keeley mode, Robert Keeley sells it with his name on the box and his opinion intact.
04—In the room
Where else this pedal lives.
- Andy Wood
- Josh Smith
- Mike Stern
An original Ibanez TS9 if you're certain you only want that one flavor — but you don't know that yet.