Review : Origin Effects Halcyon Gold Overdrive
Hey folks! I hope that you are all well and getting some good playing time in. This time, I am going to give my review of the newly released (as of this writing) Origin Effects Halcyon Gold Overdrive.
What It Is
The Halcyon Gold Overdrive is Origin Effects’ take on the rare and stratospherically priced Klon Centaur. Centaurs have not been made since 2009 and the follow on KTR debuted in 2018 and of this writing, no more are being made. This, coupled with insanity and delusion makes the prices of used units untenable and illogical for intelligent people.
The Klon was an innovative design and while the builder coated the internals with goop to make it hard for someone else to steal his ideas, there are zillions of Klon clones out in the market. The Halcyon Gold Overdrive is the latest one.
To their credit, Origin Effects says straight up front that the product is their take on the Klon Centaur., just as they were clear that the Halcyon Green Overdrive is their take on the Tube Screamer.
Thus the Halcyon Gold Overdrive is, just like a Klon, a clean boost that can push the preamp into a nice warm overdrive with a mid frequency hump and a nice bit of grit. It’s not a distortion pedal and it is not a fuzz pedal.
Placing It in Your Chain
As with other overdrives, the most common place in the signal chain is between the instrument and the front end of the amplifier.
The Controls
As you can see from the embedded image, the Halcyon Gold Overdrive has four knobs, two micro switches and an on/off stomp switch. The Level control determines the level of the signal leaving the pedal, useful for volume matching when the pedal is engaged vs not-engaged. The Drive knob is what controls, wait for it, the amount of drive. Like an original Klon most anything before 1 o’clock is a clean boost with a mid frequency hump. To get the grit and the sound of overdrive, turn this knob to 2 and beyond. The Dry knob controls the mix of dry signal and wet signal. The original Klon mixed wet and dry, but you could not control the mix ratio. At noon, this delivers the Klon mix but you can adjust the mix to suit. The tone knob controls the tone of the wet signal allowing you to make it brighter or darker.
The top microswitch labeled ADAPT is where you can activate different levels of Origin’s unique Adapt circuitry. At 0, the Adapt circuitry is not engaged. In the middle position, labeled II, the adapt circuitry kicks in to allow the pedal’s mid forward voicing to fade out as you roll off the volume control on the guitar. One of the joys of the Klon is that a volume rolloff would clean up nicely. With the Adapt circuitry engaged, the rolloff is even smoother as is the reintroduction of treble and bass that gets reduced behind the normal mid hump. The position labeled I does the same but with less impact. If you have hot pickups, or a guitar that loves to feedback, you might prefer this switch position.
The second microswitch, called VOICE provides two voicings. The KLN setting is pure Klon and the Mod setting provides a smoother and wider mid frequency hump. I find that this works well with single coils and with active pickups like the Fishman Fluence line
Dimensions and Power
The pedal weighs 500 grams and is built like the proverbial brick shithouse, the same robust construction as all Origin Effects pedals. It takes the same space as a traditional pedal so smaller than the Origin Effects Revival Drive Compact or Cali76 compressor. The jacks are all top mounted for convenient board placement The input impedance is 1 Megaohm and the output impedance is 1 Kohm. Power requirement is 9V 200mA via a standard centre negative 2.1mm barrel connector. A power supply is not included and the device cannot run on a battery. The inputs and outputs are mono only using standard ¼ inch TS connections. Please note the 200mA power requirement. Many of those cheap power blocks from Asia only deliver 100mA and the pedal will not work with them.
What’s It Sound Like
This is where the rubber meets the road. For my initial testing, I used my Emerald Virtuo into the pedal and then into my Tone King Gremlin. The Gremlin is a great little 5 watt powerhouse that will blow a 50 watt solid state amp into the weeds. However, it’s not a great pedal platform and is not a great amp for active pickups without a lot of tweaking. Switching to my Gretsch Duo Jet, I was able to dial in some decent tones with the Gremlin, but was pretty sure that I could do better.
The samples are done using a Gibson ES-339 into the pedal and then to a UA Apollo interface with a Neural Fortin amp sim on the channel input in Logic Pro. The first two tracks use both pickups (no taps or splits on this guitar), Bridge volume at 8, Neck volume at 7, Bridge tone at 10, neck tone at 6. The third track is bridge pickup only, with volume and tone at 10. The IR used was for a Fortin 4x12 cabinet with two mics a Dynamic 57 and Condenser 184 at the cone, slightly offset. The Fortin Nameless Suite comes with three dirt pedals before the preamp, and all of them were disabled for this exercise.
On the pedal, Drive was set at 2 o’clock, Dry mix at noon (like a real Klon), Tone at noon, and output set for equal volume levels when the pedal is on or off. The Adapt switch was in position II for all recordings.
The first track samples the guitar clean with the pedal off, then the pedal on in KLN mode, then the pedal on in MOD mode. The second track the pedal is in KLN mode and the volume on the guitar at 8 for the first section and then rolled off to 5 to demonstrate the cleanup nature of the pedal. The third track is just a simple string of notes with the pedal in KLN mode.
Conclusions
Well you cannot ask if I would buy the pedal, because I already have. I like it a lot. I find it hits a bit harder with the same Drive level than the Warm Audio and similar to the Ceriatone. The pickups on the ES-339 are a bit dark and while the virtual amp was set neutral on its panel, it’s a bit dark, like the Marshall that Fortin modelled it on. Thus with single coils or proper coil splits, it gets brighter as expected and sounded really great with my Rosewood Telecaster with the Andy Wood Suhr pickups, which are a bit hotter and fatter than stock Tele pickups. Thus I think that you get a great Klon sound without the Klon price tag, and the MOD mode does deliver a smoother tone, plus the Adapt circuitry does a great job when rolling off the volume. Once again, I find myself highly recommending another winner from Origin Effects.
Now of course you want to know where to get one. That’s easy. Do what I did. Head over to https://electricmojoguitars.com to place your order. Thanks as always for reading. Please leave a comment or click the link to send in a question. Until next time, peace.
