The Klon: A Short History, featuring Jeff McErlain

this video is sponsored by truefire over 2 million guitar players worldwide improve their playing using truefire's online lesson systems learn practice and play with truefire hi this is keith williams welcome to 5 what world where instant help you get the most music from the least gear like most lasting innovations in the music industry the klon centaur grew out of a musician's frustrations with the tools available at the time in the 1980s the klon's creator bill finnegan was playing in bands in the boston area his telecaster plugged straight into a twin reverb in bigger clubs he could get away with running his amp at seven and the sound was glorious but in the smaller clubs the scowling sound man would have been turning it down to three or four it still sounded good but it lost the harmonic richness of the amp when it was cooking this would become the seed for what he'd want to create in his overdrive pedal if you want to know more about what is so magical about these original clods that they can now fetch as much as five thousand dollars on the used market stay tuned because this is the five watt world short history of the klond professional overdrive if you enjoy our videos take a minute to subscribe and hit the bell icon to be notified when we put out new videos if you've already subscribed swing by the store and grab a t-shirt or a mug to support what we're doing here and if you don't need another t-shirt consider becoming a friend of five watt the links are in the description around 1990 guitarists were searching out vintage tube screamers so hoping to get the sound he was looking for finnegan bought a couple of ts9s he wanted the pedal to make the amp sound like it was running at the sweet spot of volume but he can immediately tell that it wasn't the sound he was looking for finnegan said the ts9 compressed the transient response of the original signal a lot had a mid-range character that i didn't like and subtracted a noticeable amount of bass response from the signal as well what he really wanted was a more open sound with just a touch of tube-like clipping a pedal that wouldn't make you aware that a pedal was there at all all the things you liked about your rig just more of it so he recruited a friend who had recently graduated from mit and they started to talk about creating a new design they both had day jobs so they'd get together once a week to work on it they developed the first prototypes within the first year it was close to what finnegan wanted and local boston guitarists that tried one encouraged him to go into production but bill wasn't yet satisfied and felt the circuit could still be improved when his partner moved out to the suburbs he found another mit grad fred fenning to help out though fenning didn't have a background in audio circuits and wasn't a musician he proved very good at finding ways for the circuit to do what finnegan was imagining finnegan gives fenning a lot of credit for the final circuit in both the centaur and the later ktr in the end the design process took four and a half years once the pedal was released in 1994 bill was quickly very busy trying to keep up with demand its initial price was 225 dollars the equivalent of 395 dollars today an astronomical sum at the time and yet demand for the pedals steadily grew he built tested and shipped every pedal himself a one-man operation sitting at a folding table in a series of small apartments in his native boston he says that he was working 55 to 60 hours a week trying to keep turnaround times on orders to a minimum the circuit was very labor intensive and time consuming it also used parts that were more expensive because everything from the cast enclosures to the knobs pots and sheet metal bottom were all custom crafted finnegan's estimate is that the cost of producing a centaur was seven or eight times that of an off-the-shelf pedal being built at the same time for the final seven or eight years of production the price of the centaur was 329 dollars finnegan says that even at that price the profit margin was very thin also the fact that he was based in boston meant that it wasn't financially feasible to try to expand into dedicated production space because real estate was just so expensive so he never ended up expanding production beyond that folding table and that one set of hands over the 15 years he built the centaurs he estimates that he built approximately 8 000 pedals in total all by hand in addition to the slim profit margin bill said that the constant pressure to try to keep up with the ever growing demand was very stressful the aftermarket prices for centaurs were rising as people didn't want to wait for the 12 to 14 weeks turnaround that it took for a new unit and so in 2009 the centaur went out of production and demand continued to grow and prices continued to climb but back in 2008 bill had already started to look for a way out of the cycle that had grown up around building centaurs he started working on migrating the centaur over to a design that could be manufactured more traditionally he hoped that with careful planning and component testing he'd be able to produce a pedal that would sound exactly the same as the centaur he would end up spending two years testing and listening to different surface mount capacitors in different parts of the circuit before he was ready to say that his goals had been achieved this would become the ktr at the ktr finnegan said it sounds the same as the centaur takes up considerably less space on the pedalboard is less expensive and is distinctive aesthetically it's got the clone thing going whatever the clown thing is he needed it to be simple to build such that he could work with an outside contract manufacturing firm yet have it be rugged and reliable as well one of the goals was to have the new enclosure be much smaller so all the parts except for the germanium clipping diodes would have to be surface mounted components they also wanted the foot switch to be a separate unit so they could be easily replaced if it failed over time so with these goals achieved the ktr went into production there were rumors that finnegan wasn't satisfied with the quality control he was getting from the manufacturers and though some retailers still list them on their websites as if they could come in at any time the ktr slowly and quietly went out of production as well so what makes a a clone most people agree that the real innovation in the centaur circuit lies in the double stacked or gang to gain pot there are actually two pots on this one knob stacked one on top of the other turning up the pot increases the amount of clipping mixed with the clean signal when turned all the way to the left there's no clipping in the circuit and it's essentially a clean boost controlled at the output level [Music] [Music] oh all the way to the right and the clean signal is mixed all the way out effectively giving you just the distorted signal [Music] [Music] hey magic of course lies at the points in between where you can dance on the edge of breakup pick lightly for clean and dig in for more substantial dirt [Music] [Applause] [Music] when talking about overdrives one of the measures of quality is usually the classic it cleans up really well from the volume pod but this cleans up exceedingly well from your fingers picking dynamics alone are what's making the dance happen as an interesting aside i've been working with perry on an upcoming short history script on ken fisher's train wreck amps the characteristics of dynamics and the clone are the very thing that everyone points to about the magic fountain in fisher's amplifier's designs so the clown's design is helping you get more of a dynamic feel that you might achieve with a very high quality and expensive amplifier no matter what you're plugged into that is as long as what you're plugged into can be said at the edge of overdriving already as finnegan recommends but of course for the circuit to do great things with the cleans you need the cleans to be exceptional to start with to accomplish this the clone has a charge pump that bumps the internal voltage from 9 up to 18 volts this provides more headroom on the clean side helping to make it more dynamic and a bit sparklier the gain structure actually has a third signal path that passes lows to the output separately locking down the low end and along with all of this the klon had a very high quality input buffer that was ensuring the signal was hi-fi coming in according to finnegan the other unique feature of his pedals are the clipping diodes these were the same in both the centaur and the later ktr back in 93 94 as they were finalizing the design finnegan decided that germanium diodes he was testing were more often giving him the tones he wanted he said that generally they sounded more natural than the silicon diodes he'd been using remember this is pre-internet so he was sitting in a library searching for the names of electronic supply houses contacting them and ordering up samples via phone and snail mail after months of testing he settled on the 1n 34a germanium diodes and he decided to buy as many as he could more searching led him to a distributor who still had them in quantity they'd been stuck with them decades before when a customer had changed their circuit without warning leaving them with the back stock finnegan negotiated a price for these seemingly unwanted items and bought all they had it's not correct to assume that the magic of the clown comes from these diode clipping alone because the diode clipping is happening on top of the clipping of a low noise jfet based op amp the tl072 in the main gain stage together the two clipping circuits give finnegan just the right amount and quality of clipping that he liked with just the amount of compression he was looking for not too much and not too little it feels that the unique qualities of these diodes are one of the reasons that clones will never sound or feel just like the originals finnegan said that his goals for the klon were based on the assumption that a lot of guitar players had really good guitars and amps and were looking for an overdrive that wouldn't mess up what they already had and liked given the history of the pedal this would seem to be exactly what he achieved fittingly enough there are a number of myths that have grown up around the clone first is that they all sound different unlike many mass-produced pedals finnegan built and then listened to every pedal that he built before shipping it by any account bill's ears as a musician were one of the most critical components in the klon's success finnigan is adamant that under the hood all clones are exactly the same now some drift in values is possible after the 25 years these pedals have been out there but it's very debatable as the debates rage in the forums whether you could hear these differences next as finnegan gooped or covered in epoxy his original boards it led to speculation that the centaur was really a tweaked version of some other overdrive like so many on the market this myth was finally put to rest around 2007 when someone finally reverse engineered the circuit and shared the schematic online at that point it was clear that finnegan's circuit was in fact an original approach which was soon to be one of the most copied in the industry another misunderstanding about clods is that you have to play them really loud for them to sound good this probably comes from the volume the guitar heroes we immediately think of playing them use binnigan says that you simply need to use the pedal as designed as an overdrive the amp whether 100 watts or 5 watts needs just to be turned up enough that it's starting to generate the natural harmonics that make tube amps so special the electro-harmonic soul food was probably the first mass-produced copy of a clown centaur flying directly in the face of the high prices the eh soul food costs less than 100 and yet it regularly gathers praise from players was even seemingly blessed as a classic interpretation when jhs began offering an upgrade mod for the soul food as part of their catalog the j rocket archer is certainly one of the most successful clones it took the clone business into a pedalboard friendly yet still distinctly boutique direction now with three versions in their catalog each with a slightly different voice they remain one of the most used and best-selling clones on the market according to my friend sean tubbs he sold his original silver clown that he bought from finnegan after demoing the archer for jay rocket he was touring with carrie underwood at the time so sound was definitely the determining factor in that decision the wompler tumnus according to peddlemaker and friend of five watt david barber one of the reasons to make a new version of the well-known design is to address a concern that players have had with the original wampler seems to address the desire of some players like those maybe using single coil guitars for a little more bottom end coming from their clones he then went further with his deluxe version giving the player even more control over the tone shaping by all accounts the two tumnus pedals have been a tremendous success for wampler when keeley entered the clone fray with his oxblood he did so making a bold statement about it not being an exact copy of the original circuit their literature states we wanted to build a new circuit that lets players blend from perfectly clean to amp crushing roar we wanted that impossibly huge and focused mid-range that makes any guitar sound incredible we knew we could do it our way and offer you more tone i own a limited edition in white i really like the variety of tone choices they built into the pedal and it has quite a bit more gain on tap than an original clone a recent and wildly successful clone is the mythos effects mjolnir in a way it was building muleneers one at a time by hand that helped zach broyles go full time in the pedal business he's currently making two versions of this pedal he was just starting to build another batch when i asked him to borrow one to check out since they wouldn't be done in time for him to send me one he went ahead and sent me his personal wildwood edition pedal additionally he also offered to loan me his recently acquired original silver klon as well but i politely declined the risk of mailing such a valuable pedal from nashville to ithaca and back when i knew that jeff mcelan was going to be doing the majority of playing with his original gold horsey down in brooklyn i got it in the mail last thursday and once i plugged it in i kept going back to it it actually kept distracting me from working on the script i couldn't believe how great it sounds with my strandberg saline plugged into my stomp presets and then into my rev d20 more than sound really it changed how that rig feels i set the 20 right on the edge of breakup as finnegan recommends set all the mule nearest knobs at noon and then rolled the volume back in the guitar to the sweet spot where i was dancing on the edge between light picking cleans and digging in for dirt i am smitten i've never before been tempted to try to offer a 5 watt world signature pedal but with this one it does so many of the things i love i am tempted to now let me know what you think in the comments famous klon users include jeff beck john mayer warren haynes jim cappalongo and nils klein who once described the klon saying it's an amp in a box no more worries about the world of amp du jour about overdrive tone it'll be okay the centaur will take care of it i've partnered with trufire because i've used them for over a decade and my playing always improved when i put in the time on their lessons whether you're a beginner intermediate or professional level player truefire has lessons to inspire and advance your playing as you know i always promote spending money on lessons before a new gear i really like trufire and i think if you give them a shot you'll like them too get 25 off truefire courses using the promo code 5w 25 or like i have for many years sign up for the all access pass to use the entire trip fire catalog and see where the muse takes you i love their tagline learn practice and play with truefire i'd like to thank truefire for partnering with me and sponsoring this video given the amount of time that finnegan and company spent designing and building the originals it isn't surprising that he speaks strongly about those selling pedals claiming that they do what a klon does or worse that they sound exactly the same as the original clones he goes so far as to say that the lack of patenting of a circuit and subsequent copies of that successful design are a disincentive to anyone making something truly new and original in the pedal world it points to many that have copied the circuit to a high degree and are making money sometimes a lot of money from that design without paying fine again anything he's talked to many other pedal designers about the issue and there seems to be agreement that this is a real problem that runs contrary to new and truly innovative designs being done because they would only be released and then immediately copied elsewhere in the market in february 2019 it was reported that bill finnegan had begun building a very small number of con centaurs and was listing them for sale one at a time by auction on ebay built by finnegan using the original enclosures and all original parts the ad read i'm bill finnegan designer of the original clown overdrive circuit designer of the clown centaur professional overdrive unit incorporating that original circuit and also the hand builder of every single centaur unit from the beginning of centaur production in late 1994 until the end of that initial production run a few years ago now on a small scale i am again building a few centaur units for sale by my company klon llc given the many demands on my time these days and also given the labor-intensive and time-consuming nature of building centaurs it is inevitable that i will be able to build only a small number of these units but i hope and expect to continue to be able to do so on a regular basis for some years to come listed under the ebay and username of klon direct sales the first pedal was listed with a starting bid of 100 but ran up to 2026 by the end of the auction i need to thank premier guitar for their articles by west warren and joe gore titled builder profile klon's bill finnegan and klon vs clone respectively and also i need to thank phillip dodge for the reverb tone article the cult of quan i need to thank david barber at barbara electronics for walking me through the technical side of what makes the klond circuit unique and exceptional and finally i need to thank jeff mackerlin for taking his original gold horsey quad out for a ride to entertain us all if you have your own klon or clone story please share it in the comments and let me know what you think i missed i know i can count on you enjoyed the video remember to hit the store for a t-shirt or check out the stomp preset pack and if you don't need more stuff check out our club membership the friends of five watt the links are in the description all your support is appreciated thanks for watching until next time thanks for being a part of hmm [Music] you

Channel: five watt world

Views: 329,654

Keywords: Klon, klon centaur, klon ktr, five watt world, keith williams, bill finnegan, shawn tubbs, jeff mcerlain

Id: EBaYe4mk6z4

Length: 20min 10sec (1210 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 30 2020