EH Soul Food

[philthis]

So some of you guys have been ranting and raving about this pedal so I had some time to kill today so I stopped in to try one out.. I plugged it into a Fender Super Sonic 22 amp. I ran it into the clean side to see what it could do on its own. I went for the fat channel first and began tweaking the nobs to push the tones out of it. I had a cheap-o fender mex strat with 2 singles and a humbucker. It had a maple neck and was fresh off the bus so to speak cuz I had to tune it and stretch the strings somewhat and the neck was still sticky on it. Ether way not a high budget guitar but after a little TLC it was playable.

In the fat channel it was meh...ok but just ok. Nothing great really and I thought meh....what's the hype?
Then for kicks I plugged it into the regular channel and presto....out came the tone.
It has a glorious clipping tone when pushed hard. it also is EQ'd to have a high end frequency that makes the gain sing on every note. Neck pickups can be fattend up and humbuckers can be pushed to clip wonderfully. All can be cleaned up with the guitar volume nob.
Another cool thing it does is to turn down the gain but crank the volume and treble and it becomes a really cool clean boost that can be cliped into a soft fat distortion.
This is a great pedal. I don't know in comparison how well the jhs mods really work on this pedal. But I may pick up a modded jhs pedal version myself as I really like what this pedal has to offer.

[SJ318]

Re: EH Soul Food

Hi,
JHS? Jimi Hendrix something?
SteveB

[MojoMonster]

Re: EH Soul Food

Hi,
JHS? Jimi Hendrix something?
SteveB

JHS Pedals.

[philthis]

Re: EH Soul Food

JHS Pedals.

MojoMonster has it right. JHS Pedals make a bunch of modded stuff. I want to be perfectly honest here.....I have never owned one of there pedals personally, I have only seen them demo'd on YouTube. When you use this pedal it was my experience that the "treble" nob acts almost like a "presence" for the tone and you can use the amplifiers treble and base nobs to adjust for the treble boost from the pedal. On the Super Sonic 22 I simply cranked up the bass and turned down the treble nobs to compensate for the increase in the Soul Foods gain and treble being maxed. I also had the volume up over half way maybe about 2 o'clock and it has a nice volume boost which also pushes the tubes of the amp from the front end.
The JHS mods add a 3 position clipping switch on the left side of the pedal and a rolling bass volume nob on the right side of the pedal to add more control over tone right from the pedal instead of using the amps tone controls so much. Check out YouTube for the demo of the JHS modded Soul Food. Its I think about 45 extra bucks? I think it would be well worth it. Jeff Beck uses this same type of tone except he uses or did use a klon to get it. I wont spend the money they want for a klon just to gig or jam with buds nor take the chance on loosing or damaging that big of an investment on a pedal outside my house. For me it has to be functional and durable and ......financially practical so I am gravitating towards this especially after playing a standard unit.
Also don't underestimate this pedal as a clean boost. It really pushed out clean spanky tones out of that cheap guitars single coils that sounded much better then they are. For a fat neck pickup tone it works excellent as well by pushing volume and treble and turning up the gain to near or about half way. -think of the tone in ZZ tops "Thunderbird" almost like a pushed hard Fender Bassman amp. It really does sound pretty good for this price and it appears to be built solid too at least on the outside.