01—JHS Pedals
Colour Box V2
Recreating Neve-style console saturation on a pedalboard — the Sgt Pepper's bass tone, on demand.
The only pedal here that's really a piece of studio gear. Overkill for most players. Essential for the few it isn't.
02—On the bench
A pedal-format Neve-style mic preamp with a full three-band EQ and switchable input impedance. Not really an overdrive — it's a console preamp you can put on a pedalboard, with a step pad that lets you push into transformer saturation the way an engineer would push a 1073. The V2 added a second channel with an effects loop, true bypass, and a high-pass filter. Used as a DI for acoustic guitar, a Sgt Pepper's-style bass overdrive, a vocal preamp into an interface, or — its most famous application — slammed onto an electric guitar signal to recreate the album-side David Gilmour vocal-bus saturation. It is a recording tool that happens to fit on a board.
- 01transformer saturation when pushed hard
- 02the three-band EQ is the real reason to own it
- 03great DI for acoustic into a board
- 04stacks behind a fuzz to add warmth
- 05the V2 effects loop is genuinely useful
03—In the room
Where else this pedal lives.
- Robert Keeley
- Andy Stack
- Justin Vernon
Universal Audio Ruby '63 if you just want amp saturation — but Colour Box does something different.