Here’s a new video by Reverb.com of the Pettyjohn Electronics Gold Overdrive, a very dynamic plexi-style amp in a box.
What started as a simple box inspired by classic “Golden amps from Britain” ended up as so much more then just an amp-in-a-box. The GOLD is incredibly touch sensitive, with the ability to clean up with pick attack or volume knob at any setting while covering a very wide gain range. The gain covers many of our favorite flavors, from classic low-gain edge of breakup “plexi” style tones through full on distortion with one knob, making it our most versatile drive pedal to date. To handle the wide range of gain we equipped the GOLD with our most powerful EQ, with three of our favorite analog filters for maximum tone shaping power. The EQ section includes our musical Passive Wide-Range Low Cut and High Cut equipped with a top-shelf Auri-cap for ultimate transparency while dialing in top-end and bass response. The GOLD also features a new parametric mid control! With this new “Mids” band, the guitarist can take full control of their tone with a healthy does of boost OR cut with a wide sweep-able range that covers from 400Hz to 2kHz, giving you the power to emulate your favorite British tone stack or correct the mid-range of your amp and perfect the tone you hear in your head. While developing the GOLD, we wanted to accomplish the feel of a high wattage amp and the combo of our dual rail, high voltage power section and boutique amp style tone caps help create a truly inspirational experience that blurs the line between pedals and high end amps.
Under the hood, the GOLD has 2 extra settings controls on Mini-pots. Easily accessible by removing the bottom 4 screws, these controls offer extra tweaking for those who really want to further customize their GOLD experience. One toggle controls the headroom of the gain amp. The GOLD ships set in the High Headroom position, for our most dynamic, touch sensitive drive experience but some guitarist may prefer the Low Headroom setting. The Low Headroom setting will add harmonics and an increased sense of breakup and gain with a slight tightening of the lows, this pushes the upper gain ranges well into classic distortion territory and great for those who want a very saturated tone. The other mini-toggle adds a vintage amp style Orange Drop capacitor into the High EQ circuit. This cap will give the top a slightly softer, warm “vintage” flavor that can work really nice to with bright amps or guitars. We couldn’t decide which one was our favorite so we included them both!
The GOLD is a low noise, edge-of-breakup to distortion with amp-like dynamics and feel featuring a versatile three band studio grade EQ enough tone shaping power to work well in any players rig. It represents a culmination of our obsession with studio grade electronics and over three years of tweaking with drive circuits and we are proud to offer what we feel is the new golden standard of our Foundry line!
