Westerlund's first pedal - the ONE Preamp is a really great sounding extended range FET-based Preamp / Overdrive

I had been meaning to do this post sooner - but at the time of launch I wasn’t satisfied with the quality of visuals available - and in fact needed to wait for some further Reverb.com listings to be able to grab a decent source shot for me to retouch / edit in my usual style.

On first glance this pedal reminded me very much of my long-term favourite BYOC Crown Jewel Modular Multi-Drive - which I acquired fully assembled back in 2018 - for the princely sum of $219 plus $40 delivery here to the UK.

The Crown Jewel has a little more about it - at least my version does - with Modular Boost section (swappable daughterboard - LPB, Treble Boost, Elektra, Fuzz, etc.) and Clean Blend knob on the side, with the following overall controls :

BOOST } Level, First / Last switch, MAIN DRIVE } Mid Frequency, Presence, Drive, Level, Treble, Mids, Bass, 18V / 9V switch, Soft Clipping : LED / None / Si, Mid Q : Medium / Narrow / Wide, Hard Clipping : Si / None / Ge, Clean Blend, Boost Footswitch, Drive Footswitch.

I really love the Crown Jewel - but really wanted to have it in a more pedalboard friendly vertically oriented edition - which is pretty much what the Westerlund ONE Preamp is.

Its CONTROLS are - Bass, Middle, Treble, Gain, Boost, Level, Clipping : Hard/Soft | Ge / Si, Core Voicing : Bright / Dark, Engage / Bypass Footswitch, Boost Footswitch.

Meaning the Crown Jewel has additionally 2 optional serial clipping stages, an additional Boost Order switch, Parametric Mids with Q Bandwidth and Frequency, a Presence control, 9/18V switch, and a clean blend - also with the option to switch the Boost daughterboard for different Boost, Overdrive, Distortion, or Fuzz circuits - for ultimate versatility. The Crown Jewel can pretty much dial in near enough every gain pedal there is to a very accurate degree.

And the Westerlund in many ways is in effect a slightly streamlined and more pedalboard-friendly alternative to the Crown Jewel - where it sounds pretty fantastic in the demos.

The Westerlund ONE Preamp is the first pedal from the partnership of Matt Stansberry, Shane Henry, and Jim Robinson. They describe it as a long-term passion project where they were trying to build the perfect all-rounder overdrive / preamp to produce those sounds they had long envisaged in their collective headspace.

They describe it as three unique FET based opamp gain stages and a FET tone recovery stage - leading to a very tube-like tone and feel. And the combination of 3-Band EQ, 4 Clipping Options - Hard or Soft Ge or Si, Bright / Dark core voicing switch, and a potent boost = deliver a vast range of gain, saturation, tones and textures of course.

The Bright/Dark switch is really clever - to allow you to quickly adapt the Preamp to your own Rig - say whether your Amp and Guitar Pickups combination lean towards a Dark or Bright profile - and then you can balance the Preamp in the opposite direction - before you refine further via the 3-Band EQ.

There’s so much here to like - and the pedal is very straightforward to understand and deploy. Would have been nice to have an order switch for the Boost / Gain relationship, but not essential I guess.

The $379 price tag I feel is a little on the higher side of things - where I personally would have expected this to come in closer to $299. Some of those little detail omissions possibly swing this more towards a nice-to-have versus an essential buy. I always wonder whether pedal brands engage in proper conjoint pricing analysis - and figure out whether they could generate more profits overall if they hit the sweet-spot price point for what they’re pitching.

There’s certainly much to recommend - while I would likely be looking to acquire this more opportunistically as there’s plenty of equally impressive pedals which do as much if not more for considerably less - indeed like the BYOC Crown Jewel I mentioned at the start.

Were the Westernlund ONE Preamp to come down in price a little it would be a killer proposition and would surely shift closer to must-have status - I still really like it, but cannot fully justify the acquisition at the quoted price. Available for order of course from the Westerlund Webstore.

Would be interested to hear what you readers feel! Quality and Value matters a lot to my Scandinavian soul - and value for money in particular is high on my list of criteria. This pedal for sure is pretty impressive - but is it $379 impressive? Pop your answers in the comments below!