Now, for those of you feverishly flipping through your World Atlas, let me clarify: we’re talking about World of Warcraft here. Now, I'm hip. I know that's a video game. I haven't played it yet because I've played Fallout 4 for seven years, but let’s put our cards on the table: we all know this pedal is based around the Klon. And honestly? It does the Klon thing pretty dang well.

An affordable emulation featuring – in the words of the maker – ” a bit more beef and tighter high end.” The Soul Food circuit board employs mostly small, surface-mount components, with the exception of several capacitors and the clipping diodes. The latter are silicon in lieu of the Klon's germanium. Still, as Image 2 above shows, the Soul Food's tone profile matches that of the original Klon almost exactly. At heavy settings, I think I hear slightly more compression and gain from the Soul Food, but I'm not always certain. We're quite close to Klon here.Within a few years, the pedal gained legendary status, also because of the maker’s dedication to customer service, and to hand-wiring every unit that left their shop. Finnegan stopped building the original model in 2009 – at that point, he had hand-wired 5,400 of them. (You can find a more comprehensive history of the Klon here.) I also put together a detailed post regarding my 10 Best EHX pedals here. The Soul Food, even with the build quality issues, still made a list. One of the newest, affordable, three-knob klones from a reliable builder. It keeps things simple, compact, and – what’s important – delivers authentic tones. This pedal will allow you to get the Klon-type tones while also being able to customize it more tonally than the original. I am not a big fan of potentiometers on the side of pedals, but maybe that’s just me? This pedal is called the Golden Horse Overdrive. The Golden Horse is a well-made pedal for the price and compares very favorably to the “Clone Centaur,” which is no longer in production. Much like the Clone Centaur, the top end has been slightly attenuated, giving you a slightly warmer/darker sound than the original. There is still plenty of top-end available in this pedal, so no need to worry about that. Build quality wise the Golden Horse has a well-constructed case and potentiometers. There’s nothing to complain about with the TTone Golden Horse. For the price, it will be considered by many the best value for money Klone out there. 5. The Joyo Tauren R-01

These days a guitarist has so much choice when it comes to expanding their pedal board with stomp boxes. Pedals are rarely impulse buys and players spend time and research on choosing the next pedal to help them achieve the tone and effects they're after. Now we have some great budget, intermediate and boutique pedals, and a flood of brands to boggle the mind. Inspired by the Klon Centaur, this pedal features a mahogany enclosure and several trim pots inside the case to control tone, OD bass, EQ and clipping. Joyo has been making pedals for a very long time. The R series (also known as the Revolution Series) dropped in late 2018. Honestly, this whole series has flown underneath the radar for several years, which hurts my heart a little. These are just cool pedals. They're well made. They're in a really cool, unique enclosure. The circuits sound great. They're made to last, and they have some truly innovative sounds in them. If the pedal demos we linked to in the galleries above weren’t enough to sway you one way or another, there are a series of videos where the various Klon inspired pedals get compared directly through shootouts: we’ve embedded here some of them to better inform your choice. Tumnus nails the original Klon tone with great accuracy. This is interesting, given that it employs surface-mount silicon diodes in lieu of germanium. Clearly, you could argue that it's a further refutation of claims that rare diodes are essential for Klon-like tones. Again, I refer you to the second part of the relevant clips in the Gain Control playlist, where diode color is most evident. Even here, the two sounds are almost indistinguishable.The Tauren pedal nails the classic emulation of a saught after low-to-medium gain overdrive guitar pedal at a great price. Where other classic ‘clones’ have fallen short, the Tauren from JOYO produces a warm transparent overdrive that adds dynamic gain to the signal without altering the tone of the guitar. While I didn’t give the EHX Soul Food a perfect review, here’s the JHS modified EHX Soul Food pedal. At the same time, there are some obvious upgrades in terms of tonal variety thanks to the toggle switch on the side and the “Meat” knob on the right. Used – This is the pedal that coined the term “Klone” (as in “clone of the Klon,” get it?). The Arc Effects’ stompbox is a recreation that replicates all components from the original design, at around… 10% of the cost or so! Volume, Gain and Tone controls are all you need here. This pedal has the sound of a mythical dynamic overdriven tube amp in a box. An exact, part for part, meticulously crafted replica of the infamous “transparent” overdrive pedal.” The enclosure is much smaller though, and the modern graphics arguably cooler. Refining perfection.