Mosky Golden Horse

This is the Mosky Golden Horse. It is a Klon Clone, and with the current retail price of around 26 bucks on the shopping platforms from the far east, it is one of the cheapest copies of the most expensive pedal ever.

The unboxing experience was as expected. A black cardboard box with the pedal inside, wrapped in bubble wrap and nothing else.

Looking at the graphic, I’m a bit baffled. It shows a centaur, wielding … a Dane axe. Those weapons were in use in northern Europe from the 10th century, but the long shafted version pictured here came later, used as an infantry weapon until the advance in armor technique brought plate and the “meat cleaver on a long stick” needed refinement, which led to the poleaxe and the halberd.
The centaur is rooted in Greek mythology, and the ancient Greeks did not use long handled single bladed axes in their warfare, even the use of double headed axes was extremely rare.
This is my only shot at trying to explain what the creature is doing in that picture, because that’s clearly a throwing position. The Dane axe is meant to be wielded two handed and swung like an axe. It’s function is parting flesh and leather armor, also being quite effective against chain mail, but it cannot pierce a target. Also, the weight balance of the head and the shaft makes it very hard and quite imprecise to throw, it will most likely tumble in mid air. You want the center of gravity slightly shifted forward on a throwing spear, but put too much heavy metal in the tip and the balance is off. Since this creature comes from a culture that knew javelins but did not know the Dane axe, it might be that the centaur simply had not figured out how it works when the picture was taken. It might also be that whoever designed it took a horse body and a human torso, then let it strike a pose with some kind of medieval weapon, not caring about any sort of accuracy.

Holding it, the Golden Horse feels good for a pedal that retails for less than thirty bucks. Ignoring the price completely, it feels mediocre at best. The jacks for input, output and power are on the cheaper end of the spectrum. They will hold a cable well enough, but I would not want to plug and unplug it on a daily basis and expect it to cooperate for long.

Looking at the original Klon Centaur, we see a pedal that has three knobs. Volume, gain and treble.
All of these are somewhat important. Since the original idea behind the Klon was to push another device, especially a single channel tube amp, into saturation. What I did not know is that the first Centaur was made 1994. By the rustic look of the original, I would have dated them back to the 70’s or even late 60’s.
However, The treble knob is a shelving filter that starts in the lower mids and raises (or lowers) all frequencies upwards of the starting point. The gain knob also pushes the upper mids more than anything else. I never played an original Klon, so I cannot say how faithful the Mosky is, but I will describe the sound I’m getting and then I will proceed to compare the Mosky Golden Horse to the Wampler Tumnus.

Plugging it in with the controls at noon, I don’t get any noise to speak of. Is it true to the original and has a buffered bypass? I lack the means of finding that out. Put it in the comments if you know. Like and subscribe. Raising either the treble or the gain knob to maximum, the pedal emits a squealing noise that is somewhat unpleasant, but in my setup, I run a low pass filter that catches all of it. The noise floor is also raised, but that is expected from a maxed out drive pedal. Playing around with it, the first thing that becomes evident is that when you raise the gain above a mild drive setting, the low end drops out. Raising the treble knob will increase almost everything but the low end, which has a similar effect. So the squealing is not an issue at all – it only appears when you run settings you’d never run in the first place.
The special thing about the Klon is that it is a hard clipping device, even though it only lets you dial in milder gain settings. The nature of that clipping is tamed through how the dirt is applied. It gets you a very fine texture that leaves the timbre of the connected instrument mostly alone, only distorting just after the note hits, making things a bit fuzzy around the edges. I needed to play around with the settings to get a good compromise between adding dirt and killing the lows, but while it feels like a bit of a tightrope walk, there is at least some range in there.
The reaction to dynamics is there and it does not feel like it compresses that much. There are dynamics leaving the pedal instead of heavily compressed sludge. Needless to say that note separation is there. Double stops will bloom a bit, then fade back to clean. It’s certainly feeling as if it’s adding something to the tone.

When I bring in the the Wampler Tumnus, we have two golden mini pedals that are based on the same circuit. They have the same set of controls. When you’re standing in front of your pedal board and look down, both look fine. The Golden Horse has a brighter LED – one of those most people tape up because it’s blinding you. Inspecting them up close, the Wampler has a better enclosure, a better paintjob, better knobs, a better 9V and better 1/4″ jacks. In short: You won’t have any issues identifying which of these pedals is 26 bucks and which is 150. How important is the quality of the paint job and the box itself? If it’s strong enough to be trodden on and has no sharp edges that will cut you, the rest does not really matter. For some at least. Let’s ignore all that and look at the sound.

They clearly are descendants of the same lineage, and behave in similar patterns, altough they are not 1:1 copies. The first thing that becomes obvious is that the Wampler leaves a lot more low end intact, compared to the Mosky. When I set one pedal, then copy the knob positions to the other I don’t get an exact copy, but land in the general area, from where fine tuning is easily done.

With what I perceived as the closest I could match the two pedals, there was still a subtle but audible difference, and that difference is the chunk size of the grain I’m getting. While the Tumnus supplies a very fine grain that is perfectly even, the Mosky allowed for a slightly bigger margin in the process of grain QC.
That takes away some of the fascination I had when first trying the Wampler pedal. It makes the hard clipping more evident.
With the Tumnus, that hard clipping is a harsh measure, applied in a silky smooth way. You run your hand over the surface and while you feel the grain, you’re calmed by how it feels exactly the same no matter where you touch. Imagine a Zen garden after someone very practiced has raked it.
Now imagine a Zen garden where someone has tossed in a few handfuls of very fine but not-near-as-fine-as-Zen-garden-sand gravel and raked it then, and you get what I’m complaining about the texture of the drive of the Mosky vs. the Wampler.
I want to say that when you use it as a low gain barely there drive pedal, the Wampler adds a certain sharpness to the sound and gives it even more definition, while the Mosky is certainly capable of adding definiton, but lacks that added sharpness.
If we disregard prices, it’s a clear thing. The Wamper feels better, does not cut lows as hard and has a certain something going on that is less represented in the Mosky.

However, as current prices are, you can buy a second hand Tumnus for 110 bucks, which would get you four Golden Horses. I’d still go for the Wampler Tumnus. The main reasons are the bass cut on the Golden Horse and the finer texture of the drive. However, I would imagine that for the guitar playing folk, the Golden Horse comes across a lot stronger, since the Wampler does stray from the path of the true clone by retaining much more low end at all times, which accommodates the bassist a lot better.