Built by a boutique NYC-based company, the Benevale Colt 45 was designed with recording in mind – to achieve that perfect level of touch-sensitive breakup when playing through a tube amp.
It can also work as an always-on foundational pedal pushing other overdrives and fuzzes to higher gain levels.
If your amp has a ton of clean headroom sometimes you want to actually reduce that so that you don’t have to play at ear-shattering levels. Or maybe you have a small amp and just need a tweakable boost to push it into overdriven bliss.
Benevale Colt 45 Overdrive, Builder’s Notes
We designed the BENEVALE Colt 45 from our experiences of being music studio engineers wanting more articulation and organic sound from an electric guitar pedal or rack gear. Our goal with the Colt 45 was to create a transparent overdrive that gives you the organic slight breakup from a pushed tube amplifier that is in its zone.
The Colt 45 works best with a Fender-style amp that is set clean or at the edge of breakup. We prefer to use the Colt 45 with all knobs set at one or two o’clock plugged into a clean tube amp. This gives you a beautiful dynamic breakup that increases as you pick harder. This becomes a great always-on foundational pedal for your overdrives and fuzzes to go before it to push it to higher gain levels.
One of the great aspects of the Colt 45 is that it will clean up with the turn of your volume knob on your guitar. With that said, the output volume and the drive knob do interact with each other and affect each one’s sound. For example, if you choose to have the drive knob at ten or eleven o’clock, you must increase the output volume to three or four o’clock on the dial.
The Colt 45 adds so much color to any bland-sounding amp setup. It gives the player a great number of overtones at the tip of his or her fingers. To accomplish this on some amps, you will need to increase the volume to extreme levels that can be too loud for an average band setting. Luckily with Colt45, you can accomplish that at bedroom levels!
Due to the use of a true bypass footswitch system, In ‘SOME’ setups and instances, the COLT 45 may produce a subtle popping sound when initially turned on.
