The Colour Box Is Back, Colour Box V2

I need to warn you because today's episode is one giant it's all about the color box why it was created how it evolved and how today a brand new version 2 hits the market you heard me right version 2 buckle your seatbelts this is one wild ride [Music] I've always been a huge fan of a very particular electric guitar sound where the guitarist plugs in his guitar straight into the mixing console of the recording studio not using the guitar amp but literally taking the plug going right into the channel and over driving the preamp you hear this on songs on the Beatles White Album like revolution spoons give me fiction has a track called beast and dragon adored Jeff Tweedy from Wilco does this all the time and also you hear some clean versions of this sound on old Michael Jackson records and even some of the newer Daft Punk songs and in 2012 I said I really want to create a pedal that does this for a guitarist on stage because who wants to haul in a mixing desk into the live environment it's near impossible so we set out to do that and we pulled it off but as we kept developing it got bigger and bigger this is the original breadboard prototype box from sometime in 2013 when we finally figured the circuit out and felt like we were ready to put this in a pedal enclosure what we ended up going with is two Neve 1073 preamp stages in series with a step control that as you click it it brings the gain of both up and you have this really powerful EQ layout it ended up doing a lot more than I ever intended the idea to do and I was really happy about that so by the time 2014 rolls around and I'm filming the Abbey Road London demos for this we're starting to see how people might want to use it because it does so many different sounds but at the same time I'm a little skeptical because I just don't know how people are going to receive this on the market it's kind of strange it's a little weird and it's definitely never been done but we were overwhelmed with the response phone calls text messages emails Instagram messages of people telling us how they were using this engineers and producers and studio players telling us hey I put this on the kick on this record it's in the overheads it's on the snare it's on the bass guitar it's on the sense we bust our vocals to it different people putting it at the front of house sound for their tours and several bands had this on every instrument on the state so we were completely overwhelmed and it really made me want to step this engineering up a whole other level and that's how we release the 500 series color box just a few years ago diving into this circuit helped us examine what everyone was doing with this color box pedal and what we wanted to bring into the Pro Audio market so it led us have a bigger enclosure and it gave us all kinds of ideas about how to improve what we thought was already pretty good we put two transformers in this and we expanded the EQ section so instead of bass you had a bass shift a mid shift a treble shift and we played with the gain structure allowing it to be crystal clear on acoustics or vocals that you want a nice clean preamp sound or go all the way to the blown out sound this thing is incredibly powerful and it hangs with anything on the market in the pro audio world in the price range but it is expensive and it's quite an investment because it's $1,000 and you need a 500 series lunch box so I began to think could we get this quality of a circuit into a brand new color box pedal and that's exactly what we were able to do with the new color box version 2 this has all the same power and functions of the much more expensive 500 unit but it does it at half the price and in a much smaller and easy-to-use footprint we have the full EQ with treble mid and shift we have a high-low toggle that in the low position allows you to use it on your acoustic instruments to keep them crystal clean or vocals are cleaned ein guitars if you go up too high you can get your over driven distorted sounds or even blow it out to cover a Beatles song you have completely silent switching to transformers one on the in one on the out just like the 500 unit you have XLR in and out on the sides and it passes 48 volt phantom power so you can plug your condenser mic directly into this and let your interface or mix or console power that microphone something that the first pedal would never do and best of all it runs at a standard 9 volts no need for crazy weird power just your basic 9 volts all the controls in all the functions this is enough talking we need to show you what this does because it's super powerful and you're gonna love it here we go Nick here has written and produced an entire song using the color box version to pedal on every audio source like everything and I'm playing electric guitar on it but he did everything else so Nick take us away yeah so I started with drums and a lot of you have actually heard me used color boxes on drums before but it was the color box 500 series I'm taking my typical 5 mics set up and stripping it down to only two mics I'm gonna be using an RIT 4 on the overheads through a color box version 2 and an r/a 20 on the kick drum through a color box version 2 I'm doing some carving on both of them getting the EQ exactly how I like it boosting and cutting frequencies where I feel like it's necessary but here are the drums with the effects bypass and here are the drums with the color boxes both engaged next I'm gonna record the bass and like I said with the drums I usually use the color box 500 series but the color box version 2 is giving me everything I need I really don't feel like I'm missing anything giving me the cue I need and this fits in a backpack I can't fit the 500 series in a backpack so this is a dope I could take this to a hotel room and track bass if I wanted to and get really really amazing over this killer drum track and this bass riff I wanted to lay in a clean di n sound so I took my guitar straight into the color box v2 and right into the universal audio interface so no ant and I wanted to track kind of a guitar tone you would hear on a Daft Punk record or like an old Michael Jackson record just something really clean just a little bit of picking through like the melody and following the bass line and it sounds fantastic [Music] now that I got Josh's guitar track record I'm gonna lay down some synth music Juno 106 two color boxes so I could run it in stereo I'm doing just a little bit of EQ so it sits in the mix the way I like it and it sounds great it takes that stock sound and just elevates a little bit it's subtle but it kind of glues everything together it's like it's glue I want to delay one more guitar part down that had like the chicka-chicka feeling that you really do hear on some of the Daft Punk stuff I felt like your bass line it's moving like the tame impala kind of thing and I wanted to lay something rhythmic in there so once again I'm just taking the color box and putting it right into the interface barely dirty and just playing rhythmically and it's really interesting because it almost feels like it's compressing I have the step knob up high but I have it really clean and it's like there's a little bit of compression and it's really really cool it [Music] harkening back to kind of the original application of the color box was to use it through a guitar Ian to replicate di n sounds but one of the things that happened as we created this box as we realized it's just a really good boost pedal or an overdrive pedal period so I'm gonna use a setting that's pretty much like a Marshall sound like it doesn't have any crazy high-end things going on it doesn't feel overly saturated it's just a real nice warm overdrive slash Distortion not really but it's there and I'm just gonna play on some of the syncopations of this bridge see part whatever that you've created just hit those hits and use this as a normal overdrive through the fender Princeton [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] I had a really cool idea to incorporate an acoustic guitar part into this track because the color box b2 is a fantastic direct in acoustic guitar preamp and we have this Taylor 710 in the shop with an LR bag system and it sounds phenomenal really really great sound and I just decided hey I'm not gonna record this part because Nick had already recorded it even though he didn't even know I had an idea it's like a psychic moment yeah so tell us about it yeah so basically it's a super simple part just some light picking I didn't do anything overly strum II super clean it sounded really good I actually was like pleasantly surprised usually acoustic direct and sounds I'm a little bit like about but it sounded great if I was like gigging and playing some dope but gusta covers of tonic tonic or some 90 songs or something I would dude I would take this out all the time I'm gonna put a little bit of reverb in this impost just to make it nice and shimmery it's just kind of a texture here but all day long this is such a great acoustic di [Music] I can't do a song like this knowing I have to do guitar parts with the color ox and not do the blown-out revolution or like the beasts and dragon the door spoon sound so I'm taking the fender Princeton amp it's set totally clean and I'm going to stage five on the color box I'm blowing it out I'm putting the drive knob the gain knob right at the point where it almost like decays I'm backing it off so it's just fuzzy chaos and I'm gonna use the whammy bar a lot I'm gonna be super annoying and I love it so one of my favorite sounds so I'm making the Princeton sound like it's not there that I'm plugged into a Neve sidecar [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] now that we've got all the parts recorded we've got it mixed let's listen to the whole thing with the reverbs and delays and all the cool plugins and stuff that we put on there and at the foundation of all of it it's the color box version 2 and we actually did get a vocal part recorded we went on LinkedIn and we found a recording artist named Albert Doolittle and we had him record a vocal part yeah I actually didn't get to meet him and I've been so busy I haven't heard that last part of the song the vocal track I just knew that I didn't want like nobody wants to hear people sing so I was like Nick can you find a singer and I guess we'll see yeah the only thing that he requested is that we not solo the lyrics because he said that they're so sad if you listen to the lyrics without music they'd actually kill you so that's happened before yeah I know several times so without further ado let's listen to the whole thing [Music] [Applause] [Music] and [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] this week's record time is brought to you by Bex 2017 release colors I love this album because it's so different than the other things he has done around this era I got to go to some of the soundchecks during this recording process and as the tour was kicking up and Beck had been using a color box or two in his guitar Ric for quite some time and he is one of the bands that used the color box on tons of instruments on the Live Tour that I mentioned earlier in the episode it's a great record my favorite tracks are seventh Heaven and the song Wow which was the first single my kids also love the song Wow and when you listen to it you're gonna know why and because my kids listened to it so much I began to like it even more and not like it and then I just ended up loving it it's really complicated if you have kids you'll understand but go check this record out tell me what your favorite track is and then also in those comments let's talk about Beck's records he has so many good albums I'm going to talk about in more on future record times but for now go check out colors thanks so much for watching this episode I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you enjoyed that masterfully crafted song that Nick brought us Thank You Nick thank you very much and we want to thank Albert Doolittle for laying that track down I'm blown away it's amazing what you can find on LinkedIn I have a feeling he'll come back I think so yeah back linkedin for the win and if you liked this episode hit like subscribe to the channel and click the bell icon to get notifications of future episodes also there is the GHS show.com or you can buy shirts and other things you might not even need but you want and if you want to support the show there's a link to the patreon account down below there's a lot of exclusive stuff where I dive into history you get like hints of what episodes are coming all kinds of fun stuff it's awesome we try to have a good time yeah dope I don't know I don't know if it works all the time I think it did today I'm out me too we're really tired yeah it's been a long day but it's a good day it's a good day with us we're really leaving like we're gonna leave yeah yeah we're gonna get out of here bye guys

Channel: JHS Pedals

Views: 298,062

Keywords: JHS, Pedals, Guitar, Effects, JHS Pedals, The JHS Show, Guitar Effects, Guitar Pedals, Colour Box, JHS Colour Box

Id: zQSOwzfV7Vc

Length: 18min 54sec (1134 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 14 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/ChepThree]

Tl;dw

The Colour Box is probably JHS's biggest pedal and it's getting a version 2. They are basically putting their 500 series version into a pedal enclosure, which means more EQ options and also phantom power (among other things).

[u/Niketplos]

I don't mind them but some of his videos are a bit cringe.... but I did really enjoy watching this one. Neat they put the 500 in a pedal format, its still pretty big though.

[u/Overtalk]

JHS is fantastic, I love their Youtube channel. Always spotlighting other pedal makers (obviously not this video, but in general).

[u/[deleted]]

I just bought a V1 yesterday uGHHHHHHH

[u/larowin]

This thing looks utterly insane.

[u/larowin]

I have a reverb feed for color boxes under $350 and was very curious when suddenly they started to appear.

For real though, if I were recording people for money I’d buy two of these on day one. I’d run the damn mixbus through them.

[u/[deleted]]

I came painfully close to getting the Colour Box 500 series rack back in August. Happy I held out, and will certainly give this a go once I get the chance.

[u/ampspedalsguitars]

I have the 500 series unit, sounds great on everything.

[u/ChepThree]

I just realized I put 'grow' instead of 'rub' in the title 🤦‍♂️. stupid voice-to-text.