British TrueTone : Marshall in a box

This pedal is basically 50 years of British amps in one small pink box! It's a lot more than just a distortion pedal.

You can run it like that; at the end of a pedal chain it did a great job of sounding big into a clean Peavey Bandit. It also worked well as an overdrive with the gain and voice settings lowered. I also tried it into the Peavey's Fx send jack so it worked as a preamp - what a great sound! The British Sound works wonderfully into a powerful solid state poweramp and if anything has even more character. The final method I used to test the British Sound was into a PA - again, great results, largely thanks to the built-in speaker simulator. I would happily use this as a gigging backup in case my main amp went down.

In terms of tone, the British Sound emulates the entire history of Marshall amps, right from the early Bluesbreaker and JMP models with their lower gain and woody sounds through to the JCM800 series and the JCM2000 DSL series of amps - the voice control lets you change the type of amp you are emulating and the rest of the controls work as a normal distortion pedal would.

In summary, the amount of voicings and applications this pedal has is really impressive - whether it's as a backup rig or the centre of your live rock sound, for the price it's definitely worth giving it a shot.