NPD- Jackson Audio Golden Boy (MIDI content)

rsvmark

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Delighted with this pedal. Still getting to know it but I purchased it predominantly for its midi capabilities.

It can be operated via the 2 foot switches but I want to use my switcher to control bespoke sounds to specific songs in our set. It has:

4 styles of overdrive - vintage Marshall, tube screamer, KoT/Timmy and another- all different types and numbers of clipping options. Basically some are more aggressive / driven and fatter than others.

4 types of boost- treble, mid and full range and a tailored boost- all via a separate boost level

4 gain stage feature- set your max gain and then you cycle through 25%, 50%, 75% and 100% of the max gain setting

3 band eq

overall its very flexible. The od sounds are nice and crunchy on their own and combined with the gainstage, gives ability to ramp it up during a song. When you boost it, it absolutely screams. Superb.

A major advantage is that it has circuitry to maintain a consistent output volume irrespective of clipping option.

It is absolutely brilliant with midi control. While it’s not pc messages, it uses cc messages to turn drive on off, boost on off, different drive flavour, different boost flavours and the 25/50/75/100% of max gain setting. This need more programming (up to 5 criteria as opposed to 1 pc for a patch change) but it’s pretty easy on my pc to programme boost settings for different patches for my ES8 which I use to control it.

Cons: it needs a clean power supply. Initially I put it in a 400mA daisy chain and while it worked, it was very noisy. Now it’s on a separate 100mA supply, it’s as quiet as a mouse…..The other thing is to make sure you get the right midi cable- it’s a type B with midi data transmitted on a ring. It’s a little bit bigger than I expected, think boss height and maybe 10% bigger footprint than a standard enclose, it’s a load smaller than other midi drives.

sales prices are about £235? It’s a steal for those looking at midi enabled drives