Beetronics Royal Jelly

The Californian Company called Beetronics does a bunch of weird lookin pedals, always named after stuff from the world of the honey producing insects that are so important – not only for our nature, but also when you’re giving “the talk” about the birds and the bees.

The Beetronics Royal Jelly is not your average looking drive pedal.
It’s also not exactly your average dual drive pedal.
The housing is done in a steampunk fashion. Bent sheet metal instead of your standard Hammond cast aluminum box. It’s heavy. If you’re curious enough to open it up and look inside, you’re rewarded. The PCB is a work of art in itself. But apart from the appearance, even if this was housed in a standard box, it would not qualify as something mundane.

Just look at the controls.
There are more or less straightforward ones that are easy to understand. You get a two band EQ. Lo gets you 10dB of boost or cut at 80Hz, Hi does the same at 2kHz. The Dry blend is your normal dry blend, and volume controls the output volume. Which leaves us with three more knobs, named Queen, King and Honey. At first glance, Queen and King do the same thing, they set a blend between Overdrive and Fuzz. Honey is the gain knob. Then there are three foot switches. One does on/off – the pedal is true bypass. One switches between King and Queen, and the middle one is called the Buzz switch, which adds high end content to the fuzz circuit.
So, as I understand it, the pedal has essentially three paths the tone can travel down. Clean, which is controlled by the Dry knob.
Overdrive, which is controlled by the King/Queen knobs and the Honey knob, and Fuzz which is also controlled by the aforementioned knobs.
So an example of how to make use of this pedal would be: You set either King or Queen to a blend that strongly favors the overdrive and on the other, you dial in more fuzz. Stomping on the on/off will engage your overdrive, and if you want more, you switch over to the other setting to have more fuzz in there.
If you desire even more, you can make use of the buzz switch to boost the top end and get more sizzle.
The most obvious question that immediately sprouts up is “Does this work with a single gain knob ?”.

Let’s find out.

The quick answer is no. And yes. Wait, what? Well, the gain knob does not control the fuzz side of things. The fuzz has the accelerator jammed with a brick and does only one setting, all the control you get is that you blend it with the OD, plus the Buzz knob that lets more top end through.
With one of the King/Queen knobs all the way CCW, you essentially have an overdrive with all the trimmings: Clean blend (which is not really necessary to retain low end), two band EQ and gain/volume.
With the knob fully CW, you have a fuzz with high gain. It’s spluttery and mean. The tone controls still work, but the gain knob does nothing.

The OD section literally sounds like a can of bees. A can with a good, solid wall strength. The fuzz side sounds like you’ve taken off most of the wall strength on a belt sander. You know what happens to a bunch of bees, a bunch that really is not that happy to begin with because they somehow found themselves stuck in a can, when you take said can and grind it on a belt sander? These bees get MAD. It’s a bit spluttery, but still mostly organic sounding. The two band EQ works well to make it bring some thunder. You can of course use the dry blend to tame it down some, but then you’re also loosing some of your dirt in the mix – I enjoyed the pedal best with the dry nearly all the way off.
I don’t really want to say this pedal sounds metallic. There’s no metal on metal – there’s bee bodies hitting a tin can, but that’s as metallic as it gets. Maybe if you took a bunch of bees and scaled them up so their heads are human head sized and then you watched them feed, using their weird mandibles to process the food – and these guys are being sloppy eaters because there’s lots of food and they are ravenous, some of the sounds that happen in this scene would be not unlike what you can hear when you have the Queen/King dials somewhere past 9 o’clock.

I personally found the dry blend somewhat useless. Since you do have enough low end passing through and the option to use the EQ to boost 80Hz, there’s no real need to blend in clean sound, plus doing so pushes the dirt amount towards the background. If you use a lot of fuzz on the King/Queen blend and introduce some clean sound with the blend, you can generate a cool sound that works well in the bedroom and sounds grand, but as soon as you pair it with driven guitars and drums, all your sizzle melts away under the cymbals and the guitar sounds. While on guitar, you can use the Royal Jelly to create a great lead sound, it’s not really a tool that makes the bass punch through a mix.

I did enjoy playing around and exploring this unusual dirt device, but when someone offered to take it off my hands, I did not hesitate to let it go. It is something fairly special, and an interesting way to blend two kinds of dirt into each other, but for my personal taste, there was either too much control or not enough. I’d have preferred a gain knob on the fuzz side and dual EQ controls for setting both overdrive and fuzz – plus parametric mids – or a much simpler device that has the tones set for everything and all you do is blend.