Review : MXR Custom Shop Duke of Tone

MXR Custom Shop Duke of Tone

As I write this, the wait time for an AnalogMan King of Tone pedal is five years! A Prince of Tone is also a very long time and you have to check daily in case one has been built and not already sold. Consequently we see King of Tone pedals selling on Reverb for nearly $1000, quite a lot more than Mike Pereira (AnalogMan himself) will sell you one for when your name comes up. For those of us who would like the sound today, there is now, from the MXR Custom Shop built in cooperation with AnalogMan a pedal called the Duke of Tone. I preordered two of them and picked them up the last weekend in October. So that’s what we are going to talk about this time.

Introduction

The Duke of Tone is a single channel overdrive whereas the King of Tone has two channels that can be cascaded for gain staging. The Prince of Tone is more like the Duke of Tone than the King of Tone and since you can connect two of them together, you can get pretty darn close with two pedals to achieving the sound of a King of Tone.

I took one of the two and put in on the board going to the Windows machine where I do some sample recording for this channel. The Duke of Tone occupies a board that starts with an EB volume pedal, to a Source Audio Atlas compressor, a D&M drive with the Boost side set to Unity Gain and always on to an Origin Effects Halcyon Green Overdrive, the Duke of Tone and then into the front end of a REVV D20. The effects loop as an Eventide Time Factor, an Eventide Mod Factor and finally a TC Hall of Fame 2.

For my initial play test, I used my Les Paul Axcess with only the Boost and the Duke of Tone switched in and out. The REVV D20 has a built in Two Notes Torpedo and it was set to a tried and true amp and cabinet simulation of a Blackface Twin Reverb. I use a bit of reverb from the amp sim in room mode to create a bit of space, and set the microphones to a U87 and SM57 as part of the rig.

With the Duke of Tone off, the amp is clean, just on the edge of breakup using the hot pickups in the Axcess. It’s one of the original ones before the limited Alex Lifeson Signature and the more recent Epiphone versions. I’m told that they changed since the first release, but having not compared them myself, I cannot say. I like the Axcess for it’s very light weight, wonderfully sculpted body, great neck with easy access to the upper frets and a Floyd Rose tailpiece that stays in tune. The strings on it are D’Addario NYXL 9.5-44 for those who like knowing that sort of thing.

Spectacular

When I kicked in the Duke of Tone with the Volume at 2, Drive at noon and Tone at 1, I was transported to classic rock wonderfulness. The Duke of Tone is a mini pedal in design, but sounds huge. It’s also WAY different from the distortion side of the D&M and more gainy as set than the Halcyon which I keep set for mild overdrive that works with both single coils and humbuckers. In my review of the Halcyon, I talk about how it fixes the things that I don’t like about original Tube Screamers, so look for that review if you are interested. I lost myself pretty quickly when the Duke of Tone was engaged, falling quickly into old Zeppelin tunes because the sound from the cabinet was so awesome. The D20 has a Fender Deluxe speaker cabinet attached to it, and when played clean with the amp and cab sim active sounds remarkably like my existing blackface Twin Reverb. Punch in the Duke of Tone and it just howls in all the right ways.

If you back off the drive on the Duke of Tone, you can get a very nice mild overdrive without the mid hump of a Tube Screamer. Dial it up and it gets even more crunchy. For my preference, I settled on the Drive about noon for most everything that I play. It has a bit more high end bite than a JHS Morning Glory or a Wampler Tumnus. Since both of those are modelled on a Klon Centaur, that makes sense. The closest other pedal that I can liken the Duke of Tone to is the blue side of my Browne Amplification Protein. This makes sense since both it and the AnalogMan King of Tone were modelled on the original Marshall Bluesbreaker.

Having had the REVV D20 used primarily as the amp front end via DI to a recording interface and only having added the cabinet a couple of months ago, I really didn’t have a lot of experience just playing it as an amp. I do have a number of Torpedo sims available to me, but the ones stored in the amp are pretty simple. My testing of the Duke of Tone was initially with the Twin Reverb option, but it also sounds awesome with the Marshall EL34 + 4x12 or the Blackface Princeton config. I will have to do a bit of tweaking to my Super Reverb sim, as I built it specifically for low output old style single coils and while it works great with the Duke of Tone and an old Strat, it was built for those single coils in conjunction with the Halcyon for an SRV sound, it’s not quite right with the Les Paul. The final in amp sim has no amp, no cabinet and no microphone sims active in order to use in DAW, amps, cabs and mics. To this point, I have not tried the Duke of Tone in this manner with a DAW amp/cabinet, but will soon enough.

But wait, there’s more

In addition to the classic overdrive, there is a microswith on the top that allows you to change the mode to a clean boost or if you are so inclined to distortion mode. As i like an always on clean boost, I leave that to other pedals on my boards and in the case of distortion, I go there infrequently and am quite happy with any of the ProCo RAT, the JHS Packrat or the JAM Pedals Rattler, all of which have a similar auditory goal given that “rat” is in their names. I will get there, just not today.

Conclusions

The Duke of Tone is brilliant as a single pedal and while it is not a King of Tone, with two of them together you can come pretty darn close and you can do so now rather than waiting for an actual King of Tone. Not since I got my Protein which has the Bluesbreaker side and the ODR-1 side have I been as impressed with an overdrive pedal. When it comes to that King of Tone sound, which admittedly I have only heard through HiFi speakers on YouTube videos, in my opinion the Duke of Tone gets you there. It has already proven to be very popular with first deliveries to shops selling out. However, it’s not one of those super scarce critters so your usual shop should be able to get you one in a reasonable time. At 219.99 CAD I think that for its purpose, it’s unbeatable!