And today's award for resurrecting the oldest thread goes to... 

I was chatting to the guy who made a couple of my guitar pedals over the weekend, by email, and I was trying to persuade him to remake one of his old pedals, a clone of something that today sells for up to five grand, and that's second hand, because the guy that built them, Bill Finnegan, discontinued his pedal in 2008, and in total only built around 8,000 of them over 15 years.

Vince told me that he'd actually had a "cease and desist" from the Finnegan, and when I looked a bit deeper I found out he was not alone.  Now, bearing in mind Vince probably only ever built a dozen of the things it seems a bit extreme, but it also explains, in part, the rarity of the original.  The pedal in question is a Centaur Klon, and Jeff Beck uses one, as do Warren Haynes, Matt Schofield, Phillip Sayce and John Mayer, among others.  The cease and desist, Vince informed me, is why most Klon clones are produced in China these days.

I will get to the point, honest.

So, after much due diligence, I ordered a Klon clone yesterday and got it today.  Unbelievably, Amazon was far less expensive than even a couple of music shops which had them on sale.

It arrived in a very sturdy shrink-wrapped box, which was padded with foam, top and bottom.  The instructions were in Chinese and English, with very little trace of the dreaded Chinglish.  The "International Guarantee Card" is plastic, rather than paper, or even cardboard, and is credit-card-sized. It also has a transparent peel-off cover, like you'd find on your new phone screen and the like, to keep it pristine until it was in my grubby little hands.  Also, inside the box, was 4 strips of velcro (3M branded) to anchor the pedal to a suitable pedal board, like mine.

The pedal itself is one of those mini-sized jobs, a part of what the manufacturer calls their Mini Core Series, and the case is all metal, not cheap plastic like some.  It's also satisfyingly weighty for such a cute little thing.

On top of all this loveliness, the original Klon came in two flavours, Gold and Silver.  This little bugger does too, except they're both in the same tiny box. Its basic state is "Gold," but keep your foot on the footswitch for a couple of seconds and it switches to "Sliver," with an additional LED to indicate that you are now in Silver mode, which means the built-in voltage-converter kicks the working voltage feeding the OP-AMP from 9v to 18v, giving more gain, and more headroom.  More GROWL in effect.  Someone who has opened one up reports that there are actually two circuit boards inside, vertically mounted, and facing each other.

It even has one more trick up its sleeve, which is an optional bypass mode. You can use the pedal in True Bypass mode (which is what I use throughout my setup) to keep your signal untouched when the pedal is switched off, or buffer bypass mode, which can sometimes help preserve your signal if you have more than 4 pedals all working together.
Push and hold the footswitch and power up the pedal; et voila, the main LED indicator will show which bypass mode is activated; RED - True Bypass / GREEN - Buffer Bypass.

I could buy approximately 111 of these pedals for the price of a used Klon.

Take a big bow NU-X, for your Horseman pedal.

This is why the Chinese are so difficult to compete with.  It's not just the price anymore, these days it's attention to detail as well.



If my ancient, failing, memory is not tricking me, I believe John bought a NU-X Steel Singer pedal a while back, and was very pleased with it.  That is now a part of their "Reissue Series Stompboxes".