Features

The piercing guitar tone was heard on The Beatles' "Revolution 1" in 1968. This tone was one of the most famous uses of connecting a guitar directly to a mixing console, which today is called "direct in distortion". This tone is one of the most famous and unique guitar tones, and was one of the inspirations for JHS Pedals' JHS Color Box, released in 2014. At JHS Pedals, we imagined a compact pedal that could reproduce the compressed bite and fuzz sound when connected directly to a British style amplifier. However, the Color Box exceeded our expectations and gained a reputation not only among guitar players and many producers around the world, but also among players of various instruments. In recent years, many players have become interested in units with a tone like the Color Box, which are more efficient and based on distortion pedals. As a result, JHS Pedals removed the XLR outs and 3-band EQ from the Colour Box and developed Crayon as an easy-to-use format for guitarists.

The only controls are Master, Pre-Vol, Tilt and Hi Pass. The Master control is a standard overall output level control. The Pre-Vol control can be treated like a drive or fuzz control, increasing the pre-volume sent to the preamp to overdrive it. At 75% or more of its range, it sounds like a gated fuzz where the noise gate opens when you pick the strings hard, and it becomes more responsive to the input signal and touch nuances. The Tilt control is an active tone control, with a flat position at 50% of its range. Turning it to the left boosts the lows and cuts the highs at the same time, and turning it to the right boosts the highs and cuts the lows. This is useful for adjusting the overall tone of the Crayon. The Hi-Pass toggle switch, in combination with the slide switch on the side of the pedal, cuts two different frequencies at 200Hz and 750Hz. This setting allows for great tone shaping by passing the tones above the selected frequency range.

Crayon is a pedal that produces direct-in distortion tones, but it covers a field that you might not imagine. From light tube overdrive to classic rock distortion to grainy fuzz sounds, Crayon matches a wide variety of genres. In addition, it follows the guitar volume better than any other drive pedal, so it will be especially suitable for players who want to create various distortion tones with guitar control.

Crayon's tones may be ones you've heard somewhere before and have been looking for, or they may be ones you've never heard before. Add Crayon to your tone palette and paint your own unique sound.