View other reviews for this product:
Audiochains « Hot rod Plexi in a box! »
Published on 04/24/12 at 06:30The Bones London dual distortion is a pedal modeled after a British half stack that has plenty of options: two independent channel volumes, a drive knob, low and high eq knobs and two 3 position switches to control upper and lower mids. There are also two footswitches, bypass to turn the pedal on and off and toggle to select between the two “channels”. Bright leds to indicate which “channel” is on. It is said to be true bypass.
UTILIZATION
The pedal does come with a manual that’s easy to read and understand how to dial the tones in. The use couldn’t really be easier: just select the amount of drive you wish and eq it with the Kick and Bite switches to your liking, fine tune it with the high and low knobs, then set one volume for your rhythm and the other for your lead and let it rip! The second drive is rich with mids and will jump out with ease.
SOUND QUALITY
I use this pedal to drive the front of a clean Marshall plexi type of amp (a Dutch 70’s clone by the name of London City). In bypass my sound is exactly as the amp sounds clean. When turned on it’s pure tonal bliss! I use the first drive as my rhythm and the second for leads. The Bones can be dialed very close if not exactly to sound like a hot-rodded Plexi or JCM (Brown sound anyone?!). Switching to drive 2 results in increased mids with the drive still in tact, so the leads will jump out nicely. The pedal pulls through quite well even in the upper register of my guitar, it doesn’t “sag” like many distortion pedals do when you play around the 12th-14th fret. The only minor flaw is that the mids in drive 2 can’t be tweaked by the user.
OVERALL OPINION
I was looking for a pedal to solve my problem with solo boost and found the Radial Bones London for sale at the musicians’ forum I frequent here. The main thing that sold me was the two independent channel volumes. I thought to myself that I’d give it a go, use it as a booster to drive my amp over the edge to the eighties hard rock sound and use the other volume as my lead tone. Well, it sure delivered! The Bones has plenty of gain / distortion to do that and more. Now I basically have a three channel amp: 1 bypass - 2 drive 1 - 3 drive 2. No need to mod my amp anymore, I just plug in the Bones and I'm set!
Radial Engineering have come up with an awesome pedal here, and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it to anyone who’s looking for that British hot-rodded tone in a compact and affordable format.
UTILIZATION
The pedal does come with a manual that’s easy to read and understand how to dial the tones in. The use couldn’t really be easier: just select the amount of drive you wish and eq it with the Kick and Bite switches to your liking, fine tune it with the high and low knobs, then set one volume for your rhythm and the other for your lead and let it rip! The second drive is rich with mids and will jump out with ease.
SOUND QUALITY
I use this pedal to drive the front of a clean Marshall plexi type of amp (a Dutch 70’s clone by the name of London City). In bypass my sound is exactly as the amp sounds clean. When turned on it’s pure tonal bliss! I use the first drive as my rhythm and the second for leads. The Bones can be dialed very close if not exactly to sound like a hot-rodded Plexi or JCM (Brown sound anyone?!). Switching to drive 2 results in increased mids with the drive still in tact, so the leads will jump out nicely. The pedal pulls through quite well even in the upper register of my guitar, it doesn’t “sag” like many distortion pedals do when you play around the 12th-14th fret. The only minor flaw is that the mids in drive 2 can’t be tweaked by the user.
OVERALL OPINION
I was looking for a pedal to solve my problem with solo boost and found the Radial Bones London for sale at the musicians’ forum I frequent here. The main thing that sold me was the two independent channel volumes. I thought to myself that I’d give it a go, use it as a booster to drive my amp over the edge to the eighties hard rock sound and use the other volume as my lead tone. Well, it sure delivered! The Bones has plenty of gain / distortion to do that and more. Now I basically have a three channel amp: 1 bypass - 2 drive 1 - 3 drive 2. No need to mod my amp anymore, I just plug in the Bones and I'm set!
Radial Engineering have come up with an awesome pedal here, and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it to anyone who’s looking for that British hot-rodded tone in a compact and affordable format.