Celebrating 10 Colourful Years of JHS's Stompbox Studio Preamp
A decade down the line, the JHS Colour Box’s “studio preamp in a stompbox” formula still stands as one of the most idiosyncratic and innovative products in the pedal universe. It’s a pedal that’s found a home on the pedalboards and studio tracks of countless artists — U2, Wilco, Muse, Collective Soul, Big Thief, the War on Drugs, Spoon, the National, Phantogram, and many more — for its ability to capture the raw and ragged sounds of a vintage preamp slammed into overdrive. The JHS Colour Box V2 10th anniversary edition celebrates this pedal’s double-digit legacy with a limited-edition custom finish, along with all the same features that have made the Colour Box such a staple stompbox. With a fully analog, transformer-based design and a sweet-sounding EQ section, the Colour Box V2 is a tone-shaping wizard that can re-create classic tones or help you produce unique signature sounds. Not just for guitarists, the Colour Box V2 also sounds great on bass, keys, and vocals. Beyond its usage among the revered stage and studio acts, the Colour Box V2 is beloved by Sweetwater’s guitarists and studio pros alike for its uncanny ability to inject any track with a dose of swagger and personality.
Related Videos: Colour Box V2 Preamp Pedal - 10th Anniversary Edition
Subtly tweak your tone or smash it into overdrive
The Colour Box V2 has a musical and harmonically complex character, derived, in part, from its Lundahl transformers — a favorite of Rupert Neve. With precise Baxandall-style tone controls, dual gain stages, and switchable Hi/Low settings, the Colour Box V2 can be a scalpel or a sledgehammer. Use it to enhance your tone at low gain settings subtly, push it for crunchy but intelligible distortion, or completely dime it for some of the nastiest fuzz you’ll ever hear.
An impressive tool live and in the studio
The magic of the Colour Box V2 isn’t limited to guitars. In fact, artists such as U2, Wilco, Muse, the War on Drugs, and Phantogram have tapped its unmistakable energy and character to transform every imaginable source — vocals, bass, acoustic guitars, drum overheads, snares, synths, and anything else calling out for a splash of vintage vibe, creamy saturation, or full-on sputtering, overdriven madness. With boundless tone-shaping possibilities, the Colour Box V2 is truly a secret weapon, live and in the studio.
Expanded features for supreme flexibility
For the Colour Box V2, JHS kept all the functionality that made the V1 a modern classic and added a big handful of exciting new features: a Hi/Lo switch for ultra-clean headroom; the ability to pass 48-volt phantom power to condenser mics, active ribbons, and mic activators; EQ Shift controls for detailed frequency sculpting; and an added output transformer for even more console-style mojo.
JHS pedals are handcrafted tone machines
When you plug your guitar into a JHS pedal like the Colour Box V2, you're tapping into the care and passion that few manufacturers put into their products. Each JHS pedal is handbuilt and tested by the JHS team in Kansas City, Missouri. Because the company designs its pedals for specific musical purposes, we're sure there's a JHS pedal that's perfect for any player's rig.
JHS Colour Box V2 Features:
- Limited-edition pedal that celebrates 10 years of JHS’s Colour Box, sporting a special 10th anniversary finish
- Preamp and EQ pedal for guitar, microphone, or line-level sources
- 100% analog signal path, based on the design of vintage mixing consoles
- Lundahl input and output transformers
- Dual gain stages with over 39dB of gain give you everything from subtle sweetening to full-on distortion
- Re-creates the classic sound of plugging a guitar directly into a mic preamp
- Powerful tone-shaping potential, featuring a 3-band EQ with Shift controls and a wide-ranging variable low-cut filter (160Hz–800Hz)
- Pass 48V phantom power to condenser mics, active ribbon mics, and mic activators
