You wait 12 months for a new guitar effects pedal to emerge from the Warm Audio shopfloor and then two come at once.
Seriously, it’s what the Texan brand does. Cast your mind back a year, almost to the date, and we had the release of the WA-C1 Chorus Vibrato and Pedal76 compressor, a pair of analogue marvels. And now, today, we’ve got the Tone Squealer and Throne Of Tone overdrive pedals.
As per the Warm Audio M.O., these are based on classics circuits of yore, but refreshed, modded, tweaked for contemporary players and competitively priced. And as drive pedals go, there is a lot going on.
Let’s look at the Tube Squealer first, and before you find your asking yourself, ‘Do we need another new Tube Screamer-style pedal,’ consider this: this one has a Mix knob, allowing you to dial in some of your unprocessed electric guitar signal to maintain clarity where needed.
It also has a pickup voicing selector switch to make it perform with humbucker and single-coil guitars, and it is three TS-circuits in one, a “greatest hits” deal, with “authentic 808, TS9, and TS10” modes available at the flick of a switch.
Other details worth noting, particularly for the cork-sniffers, all three circuit modes use the JRC4558 op-amp for the tone stage, with the TS9’s drive stage deploying a JRC4580, and the TS10 with an extra resistor.
If you need more headroom, there is an external voltage booster switch, and you can switch between true and buffered bypass. Give it 9V DC from a pedalboard power supply.
Stick it on your pedalboard. Pair it with a guitar amp of your choice, and, well, you’ll know what you are in for, basically a state-of-the-art modded Tube Screamer for £139/$149 street.
Now, for the Throne Of Tone. We’re still in that mid-gain world but with a totally different drive flavour, and Warm Audio is offering two-in-one with this, and a ton of tone-shaping features. This overdrive is a window into blues guitar tones of yore.
The original inspiration for the actual sound was Eric Clapton’s Marshall JTM45 tube amp tone in his Bluesbreaker days, that Marshall then “put in a box” in the ‘90s, which then latterly become an inspiration for all kinds of overdrives, especially after Marshall’s Bluesbreaker pedal went out of production and players like John Mayer (it’s always this guy!) started putting them on their ‘board and everyone went nuts for them.
Anway, the Throne Of Tone, if the name evokes the Analogman King Of Tone, the enclosure design, with its black folded metal and blue text, evokes the Bluesbreaker, but as per the Tube Squealer, this is modded into something quite different.
Both sides are set up exactly the same, with four knobs for Volume, Gain, Tone and Presence, plus a toggle to select between King and Blues modes, another to select between Boost, Overdrive and Distortion modes, and High and Low gain modes. There is a toggle switch for alternating which side feeds into the other, and each side is served by its own footswitch.
There is more. The top-mounted jacks include a send return for putting effects between the two drive circuits, and there is the switchable voltage booster for more headroom. Boom. Expect to pay £219/$229.
For more details, head over to Warm Audio.
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