Talk me out of buying a Klone, please!

[mackerelmint]

I use a zune.

[øøøøøøø]

I agree with the vast majority of what's been said on here, and I'm also happy to hear that people aren't falling for JHS Josh's crap, whether in terms of pedal making ethics, politics, or otherwise. That guy sucks.

Take away all of the mythology it's just an overdrive pedal. Is it good? Yes. Great? Maybe. Are there others that are as good or better? Absolutely. The Klon's the same.

Yeah, he's honestly someone who deserves to be driven out of business, I think. Liar, bigot, bullshit artist and since he refuses to acknowledge provenance at times, a thief IMO.

Man, I apparently walked into a hornet's nest with that vid. I've only bought a modded Soul Food from JHS and followed his vlog, which seems to be fairly legit. He's always giving props to other builders, etc...

I had no idea that he was such a lightning rod.

He has been associated with one pretty awful group that could be described as an anti-LGBTQ hate group masquerading as a "Christian" organization.

He's backpedaled from that association (especially when word got out and a boycott started materializing), so we can either take him at his word that he's disavowed that affiliation, or not.

[mackerelmint]

Yeah, it's a pretty nasty group. People of course dug pretty deep on it and though he's made a statement distancing himself, his employee pool is apparently disproportionately full of people from that same megachurch. Take that secondhand internet sleuthing for whatever it's worth to you, he had been caught fibbing about attribution prior to that so I'm inclined not to take him at his word. He also apparently built and sold some pedals using madbean boards. I can see that being a reasonable stopgap measure, but it's poor form in any case. Not anywhere near as bad as gooping a Joyo pedal like that Freekish alpha blues pedal debacle a few years back, though.

[redchapterjubilee]

I have owned four different Klones. I still have three of them.

My experience over the years on Internet forums for various instruments (drums, synthesizers, guitars, amps, etc) is that there tends to be a few sort of nearly universally accepted “truths” commonly agreed upon by many long-time forum members. After several years of reading about how great Klon klones are I was curious about picking one up. I bought a Fredric zombie in the OSG classified 6 or so years ago and immediately understood what the hype was about. In this case I consider the Klon(e) hype to be one of those near universal forum truths. I did not like the Zombie’s form factor and replaced it with an ARC Klone v2 and have gigged it ever since. I keep a Han Taun in my gear bag for emergencies (I’ve played in bands with Idiotbox Matt for many years and had to buy one even if I didn’t really need it) and recently took on a Tumnus for my mini board. All three pedals sound really close to one another.

While I love the klone circuit, I have to admit that I have been able to also find “my sound” in a Timmy (another one of those well hyped forum truths) and a Zendrive. I guess I just like non-TS style overdrives.

[rumfoord]

I was thinking about how Boss never tried to cash in on 'transparent' overdrives or a klon in any way...is that right?

Mostly jokingly, I was expecting to only come here to suggest a metal zone knockoff with a very flexible eq, a lower gain range, and settings in the manual to get you into Timmy territory, Klon territory, etc. If this were a boss pedal, it should obviously be called the TT-2 Tone Zone. How did we not already get that to the WAZA Craft level?

But in doing my due diligence reviewing the Boss offerings of drive pedals, I found the JHS/Boss collaboration that I hadn't been aware of:


The Angry Charlie was one of the JHS pedals that'd allegedly been dubiously cloned. Anyway, probably old news, but it was news to me.

ANYWAY, despite the non-existence of a Tone Zone pedal, I'm mildly satisfied there is this software (library service[?]) called Tone Central:
http://bosstonecentral.com/

edit: ohhhh, ok, "Tone Zone" is already the name of a humbucker by DiMarzio, as well as a pedal company that makes a pedal called Woman Tone. sigh.

[Maggieo]

But in doing my due diligence reviewing the Boss offerings of drive pedals, I found the JHS/Boss collaboration that I hadn't been aware of:

Wow, I had no idea about all that other other stuff. But, to be fair, he's in KCMO and that town is littered with Megachurches and those who go to them, so it kind of doesn't surprise me.

Watching his vlog, it seems like he's more one of us than one of them. He's totally into the music we like and he's a huge offset fanboy. So, I gotta say, this really surprised me!

That JB-2 pedal is a blast, BTW. I spent an hour at my local store messing around with it.

[Bert Camenbert]

While I love the klone circuit, I have to admit that I have been able to also find “my sound” in a Timmy (another one of those well hyped forum truths) and a Zendrive. I guess I just like non-TS style overdrives.

I also have the Timmy. I love, love the Timmy's EQ section! If I have to deal in a jiffy with an amp I don't know in a practice space somewhere, I'd much rather have a Timmy with me than a Klone.

[popvulture]

All these years later I've still never gotten to check out a TImmy... maybe sometime this century I'll get to it