ThorpyFX celebrates five years of The Dane by refreshing its Pete Honore signature overdrive/boost with switchable clipping

Pete Honore, aka Danish Pete, the first-call Andertons demo player, musician and YouTuber, has a new version of his signature boost and overdrive pedal with ThorpyFX updating the versatile stompbox for its fifth anniversary.

The Dane MkII offers a similar platform for shaping your electric guitar sound as its predecessor, with boost to push your guitar amp on one side, an overdrive circuit on the other, but it arrives in a more compact enclosure, and promises to be an even more useful tool on the pedalboard with switchable clipping. 

Honore doesn't need monstrous levels of gain. The original idea was that it would sound good through a Telecaster going into a clean amp. 

“Our main drive was the dynamics,” said Adrian Thorpe, in the reveal video – it was nested in a cake! – posted to the Andertons YouTube channel, which you can view above. “We wanted it to be able to have both sides on, Pete to roll the volume off and still retain clarity. It’s a real trick to have clarity at lower volumes but also not be spiky – because the Telecaster can be quite an aggressive guitar in the upper register.”

Besides the complement of Level, Boost, Gain, Tone and Lows controls, there is a toggle switch to select a hard-clipping (HC) mode or the signature Danish Pete voicing (DP). It might be called The Dane but it is more Swiss Army Knife once you parse through all the ways you can set it up. 

With the new hard-clipping mode for the boost, there’s a new voicing that’s described as something similar to the second channel on ThorpyFX’s Heavy Water high-headroom boost.

The Heavy Water and the Dane are kissing cousins, the former released by popular demand because players beseeched Adrian Thorpe to house Honore’s high-headroom clean boost from the Dane as a standalone pedal – but of course added a second option that leaned on germanium diodes to give it a bit of grit.

There is a new look too, with Thorpe rehousing the MKII in a black enclosure – which even from viewing via a screen looks to make the legends under the controls more readable – but of course with accents of Honore’s signature purple. And a couple of axes for good measure.

The Level control on the MkI was originally titled Volume, and assuming it serves the same purpose this controls the volume of the drive. The Boost controls the boost output volume, which feeds into the overdrive section of the pedal. Tone acts as a global EQ for the pedal. Drive controls how much gain there is. 

Meanwhile, the Lows control does a lot of heavy lifting and comes in very handy for fine-tuning the bottom end and perhaps adding a little more weight and width to your tone when using single-coil electric guitar pickups, such as those on the Telecasters used by Honore.

The Dane MKII is available now, priced £264. See ThorpyFX for more details.