Joyo Orange Juice JF-310

Orange Juice is neither a reference to the sportsman turned actor turned criminal, nor is is a comment on the current US politics. Joyo seems to have chosen a common household name that’s hard to do anything in terms of copyright against, yet half of that name more-than-hints at what UK based amplifier brand is the target of Joyo’s efforts here.

It’s a tiny pedal, and I think the lid is a nifty feature, saving your settings from unwanted changes during transport and of course from your foot when stomping it.
The four knobs are Volume/Drive for … volume and drive, obviously and Tone and Voice for, and this is a bit interesting, tone and mid boost. The manual is exhausted at this point, not explaining what any of these knobs do exactly. Those British amps in the distinct presidential color that I laid my hands on usually came with a tone stack not unlike the Fender one, where you usually cranked the mids and left the knob there, because the passive tone control was only able to cut and when you rock, the last thing you want is a scooped tone. Having a knob that is referred to as a mid-boost is a welcome surprise.
The whole thing is, of course, aimed at our six-stringed brethren and sistren and of course also at those who don’t feel like they fit into the two-gender-construct, so the possibility of a lost low end is something to keep an ear open for, even though the originals show no such problems.
While the overall quality of the 1/4″ jacks, the foot switch and the knobs is not overwhelming, it is what you should expect with a price tag of less than €50. The weight on the other hand, is a surprise.
If this thing fails as a drive pedal, it can pull double duty as a paperweight, even in a strong wind environment.
The packaging, by the way, is top notch. You get a sturdy cardboard box with foam inserts that hold the pedal in place, and two options for the bottom – a velcro or a rubber pad, so you can either have it sitting well on the floor or hold on to your pedalboard. The manual is, as already mentioned, not worth mentioning.

This is the smallest pedal I did try in a long while, and I’m gonna compare it to the biggest pedal I’ve ever tried – the Verellen Meatsmoke. What seems like an unfair comparison at first is actually a lot closer than mere looks suggest. The Meatsmoke is a tube driven front end of an amp packed in a pedal that likes to be played with heaps of gain and runs a Fender tone stack. The Orange Juice is the pedal recreation of an amp that is tube driven, likes to be played with heaps of gain and runs something very close to a Fender tone stack.

Running them A/B for a minute, they sound so close, it’s not even funny any more. One is a behemoth; A rare piece of unobtanium, running on two 12AX7 tubes and connecting to mains power to feed the circuit the proper voltages while the other can be ordered off amazon for fifty bucks and is so small you nearly need a pair of tweezers to adjust the knobs, yet the output really has the same character in terms of drive. Both sound organic and warm, but not without brutality.
After the initial shock had passed, I started exploring the pedal for real, starting with what the knobs do exactly. The “mid-boost” is a mid-boost, but viewed from the perspective of a guitarist, not a bassist.
I’d call it a “Presence” knob on a bass pedal. My rough estimate is that it acts somewhere in the 1,5kHz range. The tone knob is not super effective. I feel like the tone gets brighter when turned clockwise and it mellows when turning counter clockwise, but not in an overly dramatic fashion. Drive and Volume work just as expected.
Listening to the overall tone, the Meatsmoke rests its gnawing drive on a fat pillow of bass.
A closer listen to what the OJ does, leads me to the assumption that it works a bit like a Klon:
While it does not really neuter the low end, it pushes other registers to the forefront, and when you compensate the added volume from those frequencies by dialing back on the master, you effectively dial out bass frequencies. As with the Klon-Type pedals this means that not all settings work for low end enjoyers, but if you’re careful with the knobs, you can totally make it work for low gain drive that has an organic, non metallic character.
What is a bit of a bummer is that the nature of the reduced low end becomes evident before the fun really begins. I mean the OJ is a nice pedal to use as a low gain drive, but the fact that the sizzle you get is aggressive but really pleases the ear instead of piercing it makes me want more than I can have without sacrificing more low frequency content than I’m ready to part with. It’s like a Venn diagram where the stuff you want is just outside the circles. However, I can see this pedal work for bassists that push more of a mid heavy drive sound and do not care about their low end as much as I do. Especially considering how cheap it is and how little space it takes up, it really is an option for a little grit or for a searing tone that works in a dense mix, even at the cost of a little low end.

To circumvent the low end issue, I got out the Broughton FFXL Blender, quickly hooked it up to the OJ and started plonking.

First observation: The OJ has more gain than the normal channel of the Meatsmoke, but not as much as the boost channel. When trying to match the gain to either channel, the normal channel feels like a closer match. The breakup mayhem that happens in the boost channel is a lot richer and more complex than what the OJ is capable of.

Second observation: The Meatsmoke is able to give you more low end, compared to the clean signal, and sounds even fatter than the Broughton FFXL and the OJ in combo.

All in all, it took a couple of minutes, but now I’m fairly confident that I can spot the differences between the pedals easily, even in a blind test. While their flavor is the same, the textures are different. The Meatsmoke is just more of basically everything. I have no idea how the Orange amp topology looks like and if the Meatsmoke and Orange are identical in how they are built, so I am comparing apples to oranges, or much rather oranges to possibly apples that might also be oranges, but that’s not the point at all.
It’s just that the Meatsmoke had such a distinct flavor that I was more than surprised that this cheap little pedal I ordered from the internet without really knowing what it does, except that some people on TalkBass claimed it rules on bass, came into my house and starts painting soundscapes from the very same palette.

With the OJ hooked up to the Broughton, I was able to throw caution to the wind and damn the low end on the OJ side of things, riding gain high and using the tone and voice knobs to form the sizzle without a care in the world about the foundation. With carefully fine tuning the high and low pass filters and the volume levels (riding clean a fair bit higher than wet), I crafted something truly nice. A tone that makes you play slow riffs and bob your head. I can understand people that run Overdrives through blenders better now. I mean, you still should get a Meatsmoke if that kind of tone floats your boat, because the Meatsmoke does not need the clean blend to shake the floor in a oh-so pleasant way, but the OJ is taking you places.

Had I an LS-2 at my disposal,
I’d probably tried and blend in a heavily (squashed!) compressed signal with a LPF and a slight bit of saturation for a more dramatic effect and a boomier low end. Luck graced me, though – and I sold the LS-2 years ago and never got another, so I did not indulge in such foolish behavior.