The Hard Drive is JHS Pedals' first attempt in its 15-year history to not base its sound on past circuits or classic architectures, making it a serious, modern distortion pedal that deserves respect. In 2016, Josh Scott came up with the idea to develop a circuit that would capture the sounds of some of the best high-gain distortion from the 90s and 2000s. This sound embodied the alternative rock post-grunge movement, and after researching pedals and amps and studying typical circuits, the development took a sudden turn and we started from scratch. Eight years later, the pedal is complete and ready to take you to the next level. Hard Drive delivers harder and deeper sounds than any overdrive or distortion we've ever released. A new approach: Achieving a new approach to high-gain distortion in a pedal format, Hard Drive features cascaded gain stages and hard-limiting circuits, with a Class AB amplifier section featuring a "sweepable midrange" EQ and Baxandall bass and treble controls. Extensive external controls allow you to go from tube amp crunch to a true wall of distortion that will easily cut through any stage or studio mix. In Honor of Cliff Smith The Hard Drive holds a special place in JHS Pedals history as the final design work of former JHS Pedals Chief Engineer Cliff Smith, with the prototype and design completed just weeks before his passing in 2021. "You'll never find a JHS circuit more experimental than this. We've always had a relaxed, casual approach to finding the right answer. We knew we had something great coming out of it, so we simmered on it... Cliff calls the Hard Drive circuit a hybrid, and I agree. It's like the Colour Box that I developed with him many years ago, in the sense that this circuit is not a clone of anything in particular, but an original reflection of many different inspirations and ideas. I vividly remember Cliff spending weekends and nights tinkering and experimenting with this circuit. He would send me a note over the weekend saying he'd stumbled across something and got excited about it. This pedal had been a hobby of his for a long time. He loved the challenge of big, complex gain staging and making a solid-state circuit respond like a tube amp. This passion project, brought to life through Cliff's continued efforts, is the perfect final release for our design team. Cliff loved to learn and this was his final Masterclass, and he's finally able to put it out there and let people enjoy the ideas he brought to life.Input/Output Terminals: Input, Output Controls: Volume, Drive, Bass, Treble, Mid Freq, Middle Switch: ON/OFF Power supply: DC9V center negative
