From the Beatles’ “Revolution” to Led Zeppelin’s “Black Dog” to Neil Young’s “Cinnamon Girl,” some of rock’s most storied guitar tones were created by skipping the amp and plugging right into a vintage recording console. The JHS Colour Box V2 takes that concept and drops it on your pedalboard. With a fully analog, transformer-based design and sweet-sounding EQ section, the Colour Box V2 is a tone-shaping wizard that can re-create classic tones or help you produce unique signature sounds. Not just for guitarists, the Colour Box V2 also sounds great on bass, keys, and vocals

Subtly tweak your tone or smash it into overdrive

The Colour Box V2 has a buttery, musical, and harmonically complex character, derived, in part, from its Lundahl transformers — a favorite of Rupert Neve. With precise Baxandall-style tone controls, dual gain stages, and switchable Hi/Low settings, the Colour Box V2 can be a scalpel or a sledgehammer. Use it to enhance your tone at low gain settings subtly, push it for crunchy but intelligible distortion, or completely dime it for some of the nastiest fuzz you’ll ever hear.

An impressive tool live and in the studio

The magic of the Colour Box V2 isn’t limited to guitars. In fact, artists such as U2, Wilco, Muse, the War on Drugs, and Phantogram have tapped its unmistakable energy and character to transform every imaginable source — vocals, bass, acoustic guitars, drum overheads, snares, synths, and anything else calling out for a splash of vintage vibe, creamy saturation, or full-on sputtering, overdriven madness. With boundless tone-shaping possibilities, the Colour Box V2 is truly a secret weapon, live and in the studio.

Expanded features for supreme flexibility

For the Colour Box V2, JHS kept all the functionality that made the V1 a modern classic and added a big handful of exciting new features: a Hi/Lo switch for ultra-clean headroom; the ability to pass 48-volt phantom power to condenser mics, active ribbons, and mic activators; EQ Shift controls for detailed frequency sculpting; and an added output transformer for even more console-style mojo.

JHS pedals are handcrafted tone machines

When you plug your guitar into a JHS pedal like the Colour Box V2, you're tapping into care and passion that few manufacturers put into their products. Each JHS pedal is handbuilt and tested by the JHS team in Kansas City, Missouri. Because they design their pedals for specific musical purposes, we're sure there's a JHS pedal that's perfect for any player's rig.

JHS Colour Box V2 Preamp Pedal Features:

• Preamp and EQ pedal for guitar, microphone, or line-level sources
• 100% analog signal path, based on the design of vintage mixing consoles
• Lundahl input and output transformers
• Dual gain stages with over 39dB of gain give you everything from subtle sweetening to full-on distortion
• Re-creates the classic sound of plugging a guitar directly into a mic preamp
• Powerful tone-shaping potential, featuring a 3-band EQ with Shift controls and a wide-ranging variable low-cut filter (60Hz–800Hz)
• Pass 48-volt phantom power to condenser mics, active ribbon mics, and mic activators