New King on the Block

In my pursuit to build more blues style overdrives I was directed to the King of Tone. After my standard research I quickly decided that I was not going to plunk down all that cash, wait a few years, forget I had ordered one, and it show up randomly in the mail one day. I was going to skip all those middle-men and build my own clone, but the one rule I had was it needed to be an all-in-one layout. There are tons of side A or side B layouts, which is what I based my Prince of Tone clone off of a few months back, but only one layout that offered both sides on the same board. At least this was the only one I could find that offered them both on the same board. I'm not a fan of having to stand components, as this layout required, so I didn't! I squished everything in as well as I could.

Unlike most of the builds I've completed this year I already had the enclosure, knobs and everything else setup for this well before I built the circuit. That means I didn't put it in my test box and test it before wiring it up. Nope, this one waited around a few days until I felt I gave enough of a damn to do wiring, my nemesis! I've said it before and I'll say it again: I HATE WIRING! It's a crucial part of every build, obviously, but it's also the one that gives me the most stress. Sure, I've done it many, many times before, but it's still the gateway that stands between myself and having a completed, new guitar pedal. As such, I hate it.

Once all was said and done I'm glad I used an external presence control on my Prince of Tone. With the internal presence adjusted and the clipping diode switched flipped, I chose to keep the yellow channel as an edge of breakup crunch/boost and the red channel I put on the hard clippers and let it ride. I did swap out the normal gain control on the red channel for a 250k. Whether that's actually how the "high gain mod" works or not, I don't know. It doesn't matter as what's done is done. The red channel gets really heavy distortion, especially when I hit it with the yellow channel.

So now we ask ourselves: Does it sound at all like a real King of Tone? I'm going to finally take a stand and say, no. I highly doubt this thing sounds like a true King of Tone. I know, I ask myself the same question with every single circuit I build, and my extremely unscientific testing usually leads me to believe they're all good enough, and they are. This one however, I just wouldn't say it's got what a King of Tone offers. Don't get me wrong, I'm not disappointed by it. There's nothing wrong with the layout, or the circuit, or the build, it's just the fact that this one, while I do like it, doesn't seem to react like a true King of tone.

There are a TON of variables when it comes to this pedal though. Maybe I've not got the presence set like what I'm hearing elsewhere. Maybe they're using different op-amps. Maybe their clipping diode settings are different. Who knows. Maybe it could be dialed in. Regardless, it's another build down and that means only three builds left. Oh yeah, I forgot to tell you I added another build to the list, in addition to Experiment 64. I always wanted to try a Timmy or Jan Ray, but my parts bin disagreed. As a nice compromise I decided I would build a Lightspeed clone. A good transparent overdrive, without all the fluff that the Timmy or Jan Ray throw in the mix. With that added to the list I will have built a total of 68 projects. I need one more, and it needs to be something special. You know why!

Addendum

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After fiddling, and doing the official Kali test, this pedal sounds really good. My initial tests are through a Noisy Cricket and a 4" speaker, so that has a lot to do with my original thoughts. However, this one, even with the treble trim pots turned all the way down, sounds pretty bright. Not terrible, but it's just brighter than I would normally like. I'm sure it will find it's place thought.