Description

The JHS Pedals The Crayon Pedal is currently retailing at £189 and it is in stock. Available to be delivered to you by post direct (some charge may apply).The team at Just Pedals think that JHS Pedals nailed it with the JHS Pedals The Crayon Pedal.

JHS are at it again creating pedals that no one thought to make before. The Crayon is an interesting overdrive that is based on the direct distortion/fuzz tones that come from the JHS Color Box but in a pedal that can fit on your pedalboard. The sound coming out of this pedal is a bit out there and a bit on the extreme side of fuzz but it does it in the most musical way possible.

Interesting Tone

This is such an interesting pedal as it is not based off of another pedal or even a guitar related product. No it is based off of a channel strip from an old British mixing desk…weird I know. But the reason behind it is that in the late 60’s artists like the Beatles and others were getting distortion/fuzz from running a very hot guitar signal in to one of these desks.

It became an iconic sound now known as ‘Direct in Distortion’ and while some people have made preamps that do this kind of thing very few guitar pedals can create this sound. The Crayon can handle anything from a low gain boost to insane off of the wall sputtering fuzz that reacts incredibly well with your guitars volume control.

Simple Controls

With just three controls the JHS Crayon may not look like it can cover a lot of ground but it is surprisingly versatile piece of kit. The volume control acts as you might expect setting the level of the pedal but the Pre Vol and EQ sections are actually quite interesting

The Pre-Vol is your gain control, when set low you get tube like overdrive but as you turn it up further it gets grungier, fuzzier and dirtier ending up at a tone that glitches out with the volume and attack of your guitar.

Finally the EQ is really interesting as it is an active tone control. At midday this control is turned off and doesnt add or remove any frequencies from the sound. As you turn it clockwise you add more treble to the sound and cut out the bass while the reverse happens in the counter clockwise position.

You do actually have one extra control on this pedal with a high pass filter. This two way switch sets the high pass filter either at 200Hz or 750Hz to fit your amp and guitars tone so you don’t need to swap out gear just to get that iconic 60’s sound.

Here’s what JHS say about the Crayon

In 1968 a piercing guitar tone came through the speakers on the Beatles “Revolution 1”. This is one of the most famous uses of plugging a guitar straight into a mixing console and creating the now referred to as “Direct-In Distortion”. That tone is one of the most recognizable and unique guitar tones of the last 60 years and was one of the inspirations for the JHS Colour Box that we released in May of 2014. We sought to recreate that same compressed bite and fuzz that you get when plugging directly into a British style preamp but in a compact pedal. What we came up with was something even more than we imagined, and the Colour Box has become a