Pedals

The Acapulco Gold is a dirt-simple distortion Device modeled after the sound of a cranked vintage Model T amplifier, bringing the openness, clarity, and crunch that only a dimed tube amp can provide, at a fraction of the size, and without expensive maintenance costs! Since tone is in the hands, we decided to keep the controls of the Acapulco Gold as simple as possible. The footswitch turns the pedal on and off, and the giant knob controls the output volume. That’s it. The rest is at your fingertips. Want less gain? Turn down your guitar’s volume knob. Need a darker rhythm tone? Roll back your guitar’s tone control. Easy, right?

The JHS Pedals 3 Series is a collection of pedals designed to give you affordability and simplicity without compromising quality. Each 3 Series pedal is made by us in Kansas City, MO, using high-quality parts, quality control, and attention to every detail. Each pedal has three simple controls and one toggle that offer a wide range of sounds, perfect for beginners and professionals alike. The JHS Pedals 3 Series will inspire your playing and help you explore new sounds at a totally approachable price point. The 3-Series Screamer is the beloved JHS Tube Screamer “Strong Mod”, but in a brand-new $99 pedal. This pedal represents years of Josh playing around with the legendary Tube Screamer circuit and wanting to offer those changes in an affordable package. You will find more clean headroom, better usability as a boost, more versatile drive and tone controls as well as a more pleasing frequency response. This may be the most well-balanced Tube Screamer on earth, but that’s for you to decide. The 3 Series Screamer runs on 9V DC negative center power and consumes 12mA.

In 1978, the most versatile and influential distortion pedal of all time was invented in Kalamazoo, MI. Scott Burnham and Steve Kiraly first had the idea after playing, repairing and modifying all the available distortion pedals on the market. They wanted something that didn’t exist in the then mainstream throes of MXR, DOD and even BOSS’s product line; they wanted a pedal that could go from overdrive to distortion and then all the way to fuzz. By 1979 Scott had perfected the circuit in his RAT-infested basement workshop, and the rest is history.  The PackRat is the ultimate tribute to the 40+ years of rodent evolution and its impact on the guitar’s sound. Artists from every genre have used the iconic tones in this unassuming black box to create their sounds, including Nirvana, John Schofield, Pink Floyd, Metallica, REM, the Eagles, Jeff Beck and Radiohead.  Building on our Multi-Mode pedal series that includes the Muffuletta and Bonsai, the PackRat uses the same unique digital runway system to direct the paths of 261 components through 40 individual switches. This means that when you choose one of the nine legendary or rare modes, you are playing fully analog circuits that perfectly replicate that mode, even down to the aging components (also known as component drift). If you purchased these nine hard-to-find pedals on the used market right now, you would pay around $4,000. When you put it that way, $249 sounds pretty reasonable, right?

Listen to any recording from the 70’s and you’ll most likely hear the sound of a plate reverb, a giant mechanical contraption roughly the size of a king size bed. It was ubiquitous in the studio, and was the only reverb used on Pink Floyd’s iconic Dark Side of the Moon album for example. What made plate reverb so cool? It adds lush ambience, dimension, thickness, and depth in an unobtrusive way. When you listen to your favorite albums from the 70s you probably don’t even realize how much plate reverb you are hearing. Go back and listen and hone in on the reverb sound and you’ll probably be surprised how much reverb is actually there. In the studio the plate reverb signal was often processed on the way back to the console where the things like filtering and delays were applied.

One of the most recognizable pieces of gear in classic rock canon is the old Hornby-Skewes Treble Booster, a version of the classic effect used by too many artists to list. While almost all of them used a Rangemaster, the Hornby-Skewes version came stock with a silicon transistor for a more biting sound that cut through even the densest of mixes. The SKEWER stays true to that circuit, giving the old JHS unit the same treatment as our Naga Viper. This lets you dial in the desired frequency range from rich and full to treble-heavy, as well as control the amount of boost. You can also vary the amount of transistor gain for some extra juice. Some players had their original Treble Booster modded to play nicer with the rest of their gear. We’ve taken the liberty of giving you that mod as well, which is fully adjustable via the trimpot inside. Further enhancements include a noise reduction filter and anti-pop switch circuitry. This one bites just a little harder than our Naga Viper, and sounds fantastic with the DREAMCOAT.

 The Naga Viper is a booster that lives in the grand old tradition of the Dallas Rangemaster “Treble-Booster”. The original Rangemaster has been used by many influential British guitarists including Tony Iommi, Brian May, Marc Bolan, and KK Downing and Glen Tipton of Judas Priest. These guitarists, while completely unique in their styles, share the Rangemaster as the secret of boosting their cranked British tube amps into a juicy, harmonic-laden rock tone that always cuts through the mix and is ultimately proto-metal. The Naga Viper is hommage to this famous circuit. Beyond it’s basic tuning, the Naga enhances the classic circuit with the addition of two extra controls – Range and Heat. The original Rangemaster had just one control – Boost which everybody dimed anyway but essentially controlled the output volume. Our RANGE knob is a continuous control which allows you to go from classic treble-boost to a full-range boost and anywhere in-between – as the original could only function as a set frequency “treble-booster”. The HEAT knob gives you control over the gain level saturation, unlike the original which was fixed at maximum gain.

Featuring a plethora of useful options, the Giygas gives you everything you’ve ever wanted in a fuzz box, along with some stuff you never knew you wanted (but deep down, you totally knew).  The core of the fuzz circuit is brawny and fierce, yet with plenty of violin-like sustain and articulation on tap, and the entire thing is wrapped in a clean blend circuit. From there, the fuzz gets catapulted into a gyrator-based mids boost, and then into a tilt EQ circuit. With the blend rolled all the way back, you can use just the powerful high-headroom EQ to sculpt your clean tone. A horde of options await you under the hood, ones that will make our four-stringed friends extremely happy. 

Big and powerful, yet refined, the Formula No. 55 melts into your amp, transforming it into a wide ranging tweed monster!The Formula No. 55 is a Foundation Overdrive that reproduces, in exact detail, the preamp section of the classic Fender™ tweed 5E3 Deluxe using an all-discrete JFET-based signal path. The Volume and Tone controls replicate, part for part, the circuitry of the 5E3, giving you authentic tweed amp response. The output section is designed to give you punch and volume with a low output impedance to drive your amp perfectly. Set the Hi-Lo button to "Lo" for the cleaner response of a vintage tweed. "Hi" is like hot rodding your amp by swapping in higher gain tubes.

You’ve heard the rumors: Some of rock ‘n’ roll’s greatest tones were achieved without pedals. Not so fast! While that’s technically true, some of the most venerable guitar gods relied on an old tape echo unit to help achieve their legendary tones. This unit is the Maestro Echoplex EP-3. While some guitarists made great use of its echo effect, others dragged one to every gig just for its magical preamp. This preamp circuit was wired always-on, and so even those using it as an echo effect received significant tonal enhancements from the preamp circuit as well. Everyone from Eddie Van Halen to East Bay Ray of the Dead Kennedys relied on the EP-3 preamp to take their sound to previously unreachable heights. And now you can also, with our Epoch Boost.Around the shop, we refer to the Epoch Boost as a “mastering pedal,” because it sounds like your base tone, but sculpted to perfection by a mastering engineer. This is accomplished  by employing the same internal circuitry as a real EP-3, from the NOS Orange Drop capacitors to the output mixer stage that acts as a rudimentary frequency selector---it’s all there. We’ve taken the liberty of kicking the internal voltage all the way up to 22 volts, just like the original unit, giving you unparalleled headroom and clarity. Inside, we’ve included a switchable hi-Z input buffer if you’d like to use the Epoch Boost as your only pedal (don’t worry, we won’t judge). The Boost control gives you just the EP-3 tone when rolled off, but adds up to 20dB of crystal-clear boost as you crank it. And trust us, you’re gonna want to.

The Binson Echorec was so cool we had no choice but to bring it back. And we wanted to bring it back right. We wanted to take all the goodness of that huge Binson Echorec and squeeze it down into a standard sized stompbox without losing anything. In fact, in addition to not losing any of the qualities that made it such a compelling musical device, we wanted to EXTEND its capabilities because the original Binson hinted at possibilities that it couldn’t realize. We’re talking about variable delay time! We thought, “What if we had the same four playback head concept but could stretch the delay time out beyond the 300mS of the original Binson?” Then the rhythmic patterns suggested by the various combinations of those four playback heads could really come to life!

Marshall amps helped supercharge the performance, and shape the sound of rock and roll. When the house lights dimmed, all you could see through the hazy darkness was the array of red pilot lights shining from a backline wall of Marshall stacks. In the absence of your own personal wall of Marshalls and the necessary road crew required to lug them around, the Dirty Little Secret (DLS) is the perfect secret weapon in your tone arsenal. This is your “always on” pedal, designed to be the “foundation” of your pedalboard, transforming any amplifier into those raging British stacks. It forms the core of your guitar sound which you can enhance and embellish by adding boosters, fuzzes, filters, and other overdrives in front of it.

Exact EP-3 circuitry, from the 22 volt power rail, to the JFET preamp (later spec), to the mixer stage, to the high gain silicon transistor based record and playback amplifiers, to the feedback loop. All circuitry is faithfully reproduced and fine-tuned from the original EP-3 specifications. The only thing missing are the record and playback heads, with a 24-bit high-fidelity digital delay line taking the place of the tape.All-discrete, through-hole construction with orange drop 225P capacitors, carbon composition resistors, germanium diodes, and other premium parts.

 The Catalinbread Belle Epoch Tape Echo, has tape echo sounds so authentic you’d swear there was tape inside the pedal! Inspired by the Maestro Echoplex, EP-3 model, perhaps the most famous tape delay ever, the Belle Epoch features everything we love about the EP-3 in a small, maintenance free pedal format. We felt that a “tape echo” pedal was much more than just a standard digital delay with some “filtering” on the repeats. There are a lot of subtle and not-so-subtle traits of the Echoplex that needed to be implemented in order to be authentic. The preamp, the self-oscillation character, the ability to control the “record level” of the signal hitting “tape”, the wow and flutter, the way the repeats decay, the way the circuit interfaces with the amp and other pedals – all these things were important to get right. The original unit was used as a musical instrument unto itself and this is what we captured with the Belle Epoch.

 Oil can delay units were manufactured by a company named Tel-Ray who later became better known as Morley. Tel-Ray mostly focused on being the OEM utilizing their oil can technology (Patent US3530227 A), branding units for Gibson (GA-RE4), Fender (Dimension IV), Acoustic, etc. They employed an electro-static storage method where the signal is “recorded” to a spinning disk, a layer of oil (for years rumored to be a mysterious carcinogenic oil) prevented this signal from leaking into the air before a “pickup” moments later played back the signal recorded to the disk. Compared to the counterparts of the day (tape, drum, wire delay machines), their sound was more low fidelity, murky, often with a more consistent musical vibrato that correlated to the spinning disk speed. We like to describe the sound as mysterious. The Catalinbread ADINEKO pedal is an echo, reverb, vibrato pedal that faithfully models the sonic experience of these oil can units.

The R1 is an extremely powerful and versatile multi-function reverb that can quickly go from small intimate room sounds to massive washes of experimental euphoria with six customized, studio-quality programs - Spring, Hall, Plate, BFR, RFRCT (Refract), and Air. Every program can be tuned and tweaked and then saved to one of nine on-board presets. The R1 boasts a volume swell effect that can be applied to any program, sustain and latching momentary features, stereo in and out, MIDI control, and up to nine on-board presets (128 via MIDI). Players of all styles and genres will be able to find eternal inspiration with the R1.   Programs   Spring - The Spring program emulates an excited spring reverb commonly found in tube amps with loads of transducing drip. Easily go from subtle to full-on surf rock. Experiment with the decay knob to get more than average amounts of reverb not found in traditional amp spring reverb tanks.    X knob adds a warm grit to the reverb decay.   Hall - The Hall program provides the acoustics of large live sound spaces like concert halls to arenas. Longer decays and higher X knob settings result in a massive wash of ambiance. Shorter decay and lower X settings allow for a more intimate reverb expression.   X knob controls the room's size; smaller at lower settings to larger room sizes as you increase X.   Plate – The Plate program emulates a smooth analog plate reverb with nice even diffusion inspired by famous plates like the EMT 140.   X knob adds in gentle warm grit to the front end of the program simulating driving a hot signal into the plate.   BFR - BFR is a no holds barred, big, f____, reverb. This is more than a giant arena reverb. It's a hall-esque reverb with rich and lush decay in a vast cavern filled with choirs of angels. X knob controls the amount of diffusion applied to the multi-tap delays used to form the program. At lower X settings, you'll hear these delays bouncing around for a more textured sound. As you increase the X knob, the delays are diffused, creating a smooth texture, and lifting your riffs and chords into the atmosphere. See ya.   RFRCT (Refract) - The RFRCT program allows for lovely, charming, and glitch-like textures hovering over a largely diffused reverb. The Rate controls on RFRCT change how often the glitch effects occur while Depth controls the overall volume of the glitch effect.   X knob is used to shape the tone of the glitch effect. At zero, the glitch effect will have a lo-fi, almost tape-like sound to them. Increasing the X knob brightens these elements with more pristine details.   Air - The Air program offers a larger diffused reverb with a subtle shimmer but has a more “crisp” clarity to its decay. Explore slow-building sounds that don’t get in the way of your playing. Air complements keys and synths as well.   X knob controls the amount of the wind and shimmer elements in the Air program. At zero the effect will be off. Turning clockwise will increase the volume of the air effect.   Presets The R1 can save up to nine on-board presets, and up to 128 are accessible via MIDI. On-board presets are accessible with the bank switch. Cycle between presets in each bank by pressing Bypass and tap at the same time. You will see the right LED change from Red to Green to Blue. Any adjustments made in a preset will change the tap LED to purple, indicating you have edited the preset. The R1 employs a powerful reverb engine that allows for the true preset spill over. When you switch presets, the new preset loads, and the previous preset is allowed to decay naturally.   Tune  Use the Tune knob to shape the amount of low and high frequencies in the reverb signal. The X position is unique to program-specific features listed above.   Tweak Each program can be fully customized to your taste and playing style with the Tweak knob. • Rate: Controls the rate of the LFO applied to the wet reverb signal. • Depth: Controls the Depth of the LFO applied to the reverb signal. • Pre Delay: Controls how long it takes after you play for the reverb to become audible.   Bypass Modes The R1 has three different bypass modes. True Bypass DSP+True Bypass (trails) DSP Bypass (trails)    Momentary Functions Press and hold the SUS/LATCH (Sustain/Latch) switch to momentarily sustain the current reverb and continue to play over it through the same reverb algorithm. No dry signal here! Clicking the SUS/LATCH switch lets you latch the present reverb decay while you play over it.