Let’s do a little recap on the King of Tone. According to the Analogue Man website the King of Tone circuit began life as a modified Marshall Blues Breaker but has changed a lot since then. It has gone through a number of iterations but the current one has two identical circuits in a single box, which can be run independently or cascaded together. There are a few options, including a modification to the red channel to increase the gain and changing the dip switches inside the box to toggle switches on the top. This is the version that I made.
This is one versatile pedal. Each channel has the standard Gain, Tone and Volume knobs as you’d expect. In addition, each has a presence control inside the box, which can cut or boost the highs after the last stage of amplification (I set these to 12 o’clock when I built it and haven’t touched them since). The real magic however is in those toggle switches. These include or remove clipping diodes and their configuration basically changes the ‘type’ of the pedal.
With both switches turned off, there is no clipping in the circuit aside from the power rails and it essentially functions as a clean OD with a sweet EQ.
Turn the first switch on and you get a soft clipping overdrive pedal like a Tube Screamer
Turn on the second switch and it turns into a true hard clipping distortion pedal like a Rat. When the second switch is on, the first switch no longer has much effect.
As an aside...
Soft clipping means that you have your clipping diodes in the feedback look of an op-amp. This leaves a good part of the original signal intact but adds the clipped harmonics. It also allows the signal volume to get pretty high.
Hard clipping means that the clipping diodes on in the signal path itself. This means that the signal is modified direct and none of dry signal will get through. It limits the volume to a very defined level, which (ironically) means that it will be softer than the other options (although much more distorted) and a lot more compressed.
… and now back to your scheduled programming
Taken together, this gives you a LOT of options and that’s not even considering how the circuits stack together. Options are great… but they do mean that in amongst the amazing sounds in the box… there are also a few that are… less pleasant. This is a pedal that requires a little tweaking.
There are too many options to demonstrate completely but I’ve put together three sound bites showing the different clipping types. These were all recorded with using my Brian Moore (JB pickup), through the pedal and into my Band Master reverb’s Normal channel, which I’ve modified with a slightly more modern voicing. Recording was done through my Load box. Each starts with the pedal off and then slowly walks the gain up from about 3 to 10. (Please forgive the wonky tuning… :/)
First is the overdrive on the blue channel. You will get some clipping from the pedals here but most will come from the amp itself and you can really hear the delicious plexi style cold clipper in the last couple of clips.
Second is the soft clipping on the red channel. Soft clipping puts diodes in the feedback loop of the second op-amp (after gain), which means that you still get some of the dry signal through… one thing I found interesting is how there is more dry coming through at the higher gain levels.
Third is the hard clipping on the red channel. Hard clipping puts the diodes in the signal path after the second op-amp. So you don’t have any of the dry signal coming through and you get a fair volume drop relative to the OD and soft clipping. This is full distortion pedal territory.
Finally, here is a fun clip. This is my G&L ASAT (tele) into the Ting of Klone with both channels on into my Klone (all set to OD with no clipping) and then to the trem channel on the band master. I didn’t touch the pedals or amp while putting this together and all changes were handled from the guitar. There is rather a lot of hum in this clip, most from the single coil but the amp is contributing too… need to look into it.
I’m genuinely very chuffed with this pedal. The project wasn’t exactly straight forward and it took me forever to finish but all in all it was good fun and it sounds great.
My one complaint is that the toggle switches are a little close to the foot switches and you could easily bump them. If I ever built another I would try to make the dip switches and mount them on the back.