And then there were 3 - King Tone adds the Heavy Hand and Soloist Overdrives to its new Recessed-knobs Rounded Enclosure Format Series

This new King Tone format has turned out to be something of a Marmite project for the brand - with consumers having mixed feelings on this new shape - which I feel owes a lot to the Danelectro Billionaire Series, which in turn surely took its form-factor in part from a computer mouse shape.

King Tone is beset with so many grey and black market fakes of its signature pedals, that these new designs are designed to both enhance the specific pedal performance and experience, but also make it harder for black market clones and copies to be made of these pedals. So I most definitely appreciate and approve of what Jesse is doing with this project.

I’ve kind of taken to calling this the ’Recessed Series’ - based on the specific flush-fit knob configuration - and hence my pun on ’Recess’d Pieces’ (Reese’s Pieces).

I actually really rather like this new enclosure format - with its easily-accessible 4-way dip-switches panel on the rear of the pedal, and Input and Output Jacks stacked on top of each other. I also feel that the recessed knobs are a really neat touch! However there was something about the original that didn’t quite resonate with me - which was really the nature of the label fonts, style of legends and typography in general. And that is further amplified now when you see all 3 pedals together. I’m not convinced these are the ideal font choices - and the disparity between each one really just doesn’t sit right with me.

I like what Keeley did with their 4-in-1 Series - particularly in colour-coding those anodised aluminium knobs. There the different thematic knob colours definitely work for Keeley. And I feel that a similar approach should have been employed here too. Currently the only fully obvious visual differentiator is the Colour of the LED. Those font choices don’t look good together - the original Blue Power is the best balanced overall (apart from the thinner knob marker lines!) , while the others kind of look like inferior takes on that theme. Which is a shame really as those enclosure are beautifully engineered every which way. I would personally be looking to harmonise the text labels across all three - and bring some tasteful knob colours into play!

Each of these circuits is well known already, and each derived from a classic vintage circuit. With this being simply the most evolved iterations of those to date. All 3 have the same price tag of $299.99. These are all obviously significant extended range takes on those classic pedals, and thus largely justify those high premiums. They’re already up for orders on the King Tone Guitar Webstore, and will surely be at International dealers soon enough too.

I already own plenty of Blues Breaker, Timmy and Tube Screamer variants, so I’m not really in any particular rush to acquire any of these, but one or two might find their way into the reference collection eventually.

Be good to hear some wider opinions on this trio!

Note that there are no demos yet of the new formats of Heavy Hand and Soloist -  and so I’ve referenced the previous models below!