Joyo / Harley Benton American Sound

This is a bit of a detour from the pedals I usually experience, but I wanted to learn a bit more about the cheap end of the scale. This pedal is made with different brand names on it. In Germany, it’s sold by Thomann under their house brand Harley Benton.
Reading the supplied manual gives me the impression that this text is not only not really helpful, I want to go as far and say it’s actually misleading.

Looking at a pedal that retails for 29.99, this feels surprisingly well made. Yes, the edges could be a bit smoother, but the knobs and foot switch feel okay. The input and output jacks seem to be on the cheaper end of the spectrum, but they hold a cable well enough. The bottom lid is rubberized so the pedal will sit better on flat surfaces, but it also means it’s not easily velcro’ed to mount it on a pedal board. There even is a battery compartment with a lid that opens without tools.
All in all, first impressions exceed expectations.
Plugging it in, the first thing I wanted to know was if I am dealing with a Fender tone stack here, where the three band EQ is boost only for bass and treble and cut only for mids. The answer is not as easy as that, though.
After putting in a fair bit of work with headphones and a keen ear, and I arrived at this: The bass knob is post clipping and it is boost/cut. I found that I reached unity with the knob slightly before noon. Turning it down made the sound anemic and raising it gave it a certain oomph.
The mids knob is weird, because there is a LOT of interaction with the voice knob. With the voice knob all the way down, it feels that mids maxed is flat. With the voice knob going higher, it feels like other things are happening, the sound gets honky and when you turn down mids, the honk gets less. At first I thought I was dealing with parametric mids, but it was not as simple as that. The treble knob acts north of 3k, at least my ears tell me so, so cutting and boosting is a bit hard to determine in my setup. The pedal is not super noisy, but there is a certain floor and a bit of hiss and when you filter out the latter with a LPF, it’s not exactly easy to tell what’s going on. Yes, turning up the treble will give you more top end. But turning it down, I could not really say if going back from noon would cut anything or not.
Apart from the EQ, there are three more knobs. Level is volume, and that one is straightforward. So is Drive.
Voice, as already mentioned, will influence what the mids knob sounds like – but it also affects the drive.
The closest explanation I could come up with is that it is some sort of pre-clipping mid scoop that turns to a mid bump when you turn it up – that sounds about right. It feels like the mids are only mildly affected when you have the voice knob all the way down and the mids knob all the way up or vice versa. Interesting design choice. I know this was geared and marketed for guitar, the bass playing community merely adopted it because it works well on bass, too. So the midrange takes a bit to find a sweet spot that works. Especially at higher drive settings with higher voice settings, it nearly sounds like a cocked wah, and you have to EQ your way out of that before you can properly use it on bass.

Baffled by the complexity of that pedal, I started thinking less musician and more philosopher.
I asked myself how the people at Joyo came up with such an intricate design and then sell it to shops who retail it for 29.99 and both Joyo and the shop make a profit.
The prompt answer was actually quite simple: They did not. These pedals usually are not an invention of any kind, but a more or less straight copy of something that already exists. Asking google what pedal might have been the origin led to a straight answer: The Tech21 Sansamp Blonde. Now looking into the manual of the Blonde, I saw a very detailed description of what I experienced earlier.
It turns out that the EQ is boost and cut, with the lows sitting at 125Hz and the treble sitting at 3,2kHz, but I suppose the bass and treble filters are shelving, so it’s from 125Hz downwards and from 3,2kHz upwards. The mids are described as doing +-12dB at 1000Hz, but I could not confirm that by ear.
Google led me to the Telecaster Discussion Page Reissue ( https://www.tdpri.com/threads/joyo-american-vs-tech21-blonde-comparison-many-graphs.786013/?ref=tonealchemists.com ) where a user had conducted some real testing and posted the created graphs. It turns out the mids knob on the Blonde is 1kHz while the Joyo sits way lower than that. Here’s my philosophical explanation:
I know the Tech21 Character series has a few pedals in it. I also know that Joyo has done copies of at least some of them. The Tech21 VT Bass, Liverpool, British and California all have the mids knob centered at 500Hz, only the Blonde has the mids at 1kHz.
So my humble guess would be that while trying to make credible copies of existing designs, they also aimed at retailing them for thirty bucks and still wanted to make a profit off that, so it might be easier to put in the same mids components they use in the other pedals instead of making this one different.

Since this is …inspired… by a Sansamp product and these usually come with a cab sim in the form of a treble roll off, I started listening for that – and indeed, the American Sound has that, too. It’s actually a nice feature for bassists that aim to go ampless. The only downside here is that the pedal does not feature a balanced output to go straight to the mixer, you would need to add a DI.

Let’s summarize the controls once more, after reading up on this:
Level is level.
Drive is gain.
Voice is a pre gain mids control that applies a 400Hz cut fully CCW and an 800Hz Boost fully CW
Low is bass, sitting at 125Hz, reaching down to below 50Hz, boost and cut
Mid is mids, around 450Hz, boost and cut
High is treble, boosting or cutting at 3,2kHz, with the Low Pass filter not far behind – this pedal cannot get into shrill territory – you’re not even approaching 10kHz.

Armed with that knowledge, it’s time for the next round. Setting up the pedal while actually knowing what the knobs do should make things a little easier and more straightforward, at least I thought.
In the end, it (yet again) came down to using my ears and carefully applying the EQ and Voice to the signal in small increments, listening to what sounds better or worse. I found that the Voice knob should stay below noon for bass use and that it is more fun to play at lower drive levels (also before noon).
This invokes a gentle breakup that reminds me of most Sansamp products I have used. It’s trying to sound like an amp with a mic in front, so there is that texture that I usually attribute to speakers being driven hard in combination with the sound of overdrive.
I don’t particularly like the hotter settings, the natural feeling of the milder settings gets lost here and it sounds like a mix of a synth-style drive and a regular drive.
All in all, you get your money’s worth and then some. When you factor in cost, it’s really a good product – a usable pedal that is designed for guitar, but works on bass when you’re not overdoing it for a ridiculous price.