The Joyo American Sound

Fender tone that won't break your back...

Rating:
A versatile amp sim solution that does everything you need without going digital.



The Joyo American Sound is another of those naughty Chinese pedals that 'borrows' its design from a certain New York City-based designer of analogue amp simulation pedals. As such it is designed to simulate a range of American amplifier sounds, from a Fender Deluxe to a Mesa Boogie.

I bought this pedal as I needed to be able to simulate the sound of an amp so that I could play direct to P.A. but not have to lug around my Pod HD500 for a simple corner-of-a-bar gig. I needed something that could take me from glassy clean to bluesy grit, with only the occasional venture into high-gain territory. However, though I bought it as a compromise, I soon came to love its hands-on, menuless simplicity and interactive tube-like response.

Having used a Pod HD500 for years, I was used to spending hours at home programming presets, geeking out over using a Fender Twin model for clean sounds, and a Dr. Z head paired with Celestion V30s for grind, and a Soldano with Greenbacks for high-gain - only to find that when I was actually at the gig, that I hadn't programmed in quite enough grit on this patch, or slightly too much reverb on that - and found myself squinting at a little LCD screen trying to edit patches while the audience lost interest in me.

Not so with this little beauty. The simplicity of its design is this - the top of the pedal contains three bands of very useful and powerful EQ - bass, mid and treble. The 'Gain' control sets the amount of grit and the 'Level' control sets the ultimate volume of the pedal's output. So far, so normal. The genius of this pedal is in its 'Voice' control. Essentially the 'Voice' control takes you smoothly from a Fender 57 Deluxe sound at far-left, through a Bassman/JTM45 sound in the middle, to a Mesa Boogie/JCM800 sound at far-right. Sweeping this pedal though this spectrum will change its drive characteristics such that a moderate drive setting when the voice control is at the far left, becomes quite a heavy distortion when the voice setting is at the far-right.

This basically means that you can touch all the main bases of any gig's guitar tones with the interaction of the 'Voice' and the 'Gain' knobs. And you can grab any of them during the gig to adjust, in a way that could take precious stage minutes of squinting on a digital box. I mean do your audiences really care whether you're using a perfect model of a Marshall Superlead to play that Peter Green solo? No, but they will notice if you haven't quite set enough gain to get the notes to ring out and have to stop after the first few bars and put your glasses on to adjust your patch on a digital gizmo.

And so to the sound. When set to a pristine clean, this pedal adds just enough spank and sponginess to make you feel as if you're playing through a nice clean Fender amp - and the built-in speaker simulator (really just an analogue EQ curve) will take the sharp edges off your signal. I actually prefer the clean sound of this pedal to any of the clean settings on my HD500. With a little grit added this pedal can bark with the best of them, but it begins to lose out to the HD500 when it comes to high gain - sounding a bit more like a solid state Crate amp from the 90s on that setting. It is asking a bit much for a single pedal to cover all that territory flawlessly and you can always put in your favourite dirt pedal in front of the American Sound as you would with any other amp.

In summary - if you play gigs direct into a PA or acoustic amp and need a decent array of amp sounds with limited real-estate - the American Sound will more than cover you. It won't be your best friend if you're a long-haired shredder - but it's unlikely you'll be playing gigs direct to P.A. anyway if you're that guy. For jazz cats, country pickers, and barroom blues stompers this pedal could save you from unnecessary digital headaches and back problems and all for the price of a couple of fancy craft beers. It's been on my board for 3 years and several hundred gigs and will remain there until I spill one of those craft beers on it, at which point I'll be back on Thomann to buy another.