It was the JHS Clover that peaked my interest in other JHS preamps. The Clover is amazing as a clean boost! But I wanted a little more extra over the eq and some beatles-like chime and saturation. I got the Colour Box v2 and it instantly gave my sound a 3D-like depth and headroom. I run the signal through the colorbox and blend in parallel with the signal through my amp. It's the best of all worlds. I have never felt so in control of my tone and sound before. It is amazing!

I owned a big box recording studio for 20 years. In that time, I got to use API, Great River, Chandler Germanium, Avedis-- a lot of amazing mic pre amps and eq's. The color box is it's own thing. Not an emulation. But the sound is full, open, and transformery (is that a word?) good. The eq is useful in a kindergarten big-colors sort of way. Here's the best part, you can use it on your pedal board, or as a front end to you DAW's DAC and you will be very very happy.

Absolutely one of the greatest pieces of gear to have! Everyone should have multiple.

This colour box is an invaluable desk top or pedalboard preamp that allows you to record great sounding vocals, guitars, bass, drums, etc. You can run a vocal mic into the XLR input/XLR output to your DAW then take an unbalanced 1/4" line out to your effect pedals and take that line to a separate unbalanced input on another track for parallel recordings. You can get those 60's and 70's direct to the console guitar sounds. Fun to use for a novice or a pro!

This is undeniably a fantastic pedal, especially for use in the studio. It has a variety of applications and can create some incredibly cool sounds - for almost a tenth of the price of a comparable pro preamp. The controls are all very well thought out - the "step" knob and the hi-lo switch are both terrific additions that make the pedal more versatile for different signal levels.

One complaint that I just have to voice - why on earth is the bass filter on the right, and the treble on the left? I understand that this is quite an OCD gripe, but when working quickly to dial in a sound, I have to fight my intuition to know which knob to turn. For any EQ visualization, bass is always on the left and treble is always on the right, so I can't figure out why they made this choice.

Still a great pedal!

I wrote a review earlier, shortly after starting to use this pedal. Now, many months and many shows later, I can say this is a must if you have a digital piano in your rig. DPs are probably the hardest to tame, with lots of harsh harmonics, especially through harsh high frequency PA drivers, and it worsens the louder you get. I find myself usually doing several little tweaks during a show, usually not fiddling with the parametric EQ, but occassionally grateful to have it. This box is very well thought out. The only thing I don't like is the Neve overdrive distortion, which you can leave off. It sounds like an overdriven solid state mixer. No thanks. Thanks for the rest. (Spell colour right for the Brits!)

For recording, I use this as a convenient and quick set up as a mic pre amplifier (SM7 into a TASCAM DP24) originally intended for mapping out a scratch vocal for a track expecting the track to be redone with a more complicated setup however the setup I explained is top notch pro level.. easy set up and when I'm finished with the vocal, so easy to break down and put away to keep the studio organized... XLR mic in, and XLR out direct to the DAW. I generally use my AKG 214 into a Black Lion Auteur, into Warm WA76 then into the DAW however that is a more time consuming and involved setup... The results of this pedal are amazing. I have used it on kick drum and it sounds great running an electric bass through it... The only improvement maybe on the next version would be to ask for a effects loop so a compressor pedal could be inserted? Anyways I'm quite sure it would work well on almost anything you throw at it... I now own 3 JHS pedals as Josh does a great job of explaining products on his channel..

This pedal just somehow makes everything sound a little bit better, whether that be vocals, acoustic guitar, or electric bass (for my use cases). Amazingly versatile preamp for live use and recording. Very intuitive to use, as well.

I had been looking for sometime for something that would give me control over my accordion to shape the sound. I didn't know if it existed then I saw this and took a chance. It works beautifully and does exactly what I wanted.

I also sing and tried it on vocal. I was taken back, I thought I sounded much better and enjoyed singing more. I think I read another review that said they loved their voice too.

WAIT, I also play bass (electric and upright). On upright it is a game changer. I can get a much more woody sound and it was CLEAR. It was similar to pressing your head against the neck and hearing the articulation more. I felt my intonation was better and somehow easier.

I did not try it on electric. I have other pedals for that and don't want to change. I'm also NOT interested in the distortion feature. But if you are a guitar player, I'm certain all the claims and demos you find on the subject are spot on. Everything I read and saw was true for me.

Makes all of my old and cheap mics sound amazing and useable.

I love transformers! Is that so wrong?

This is a keyboard player's wishbox for me. The EQ section is quick and easy for fixing tone (ironically, without coloration), especially for the egregious overtones of live digital pianos. Short of a rack mount parametric EQ, it's the best EQ I've used; very intuitive and natural in adjusting the sound. The high pass filter is fantastic for cleaning up the thump and boom on the majority of keyboard patches you typically hear though your reinforcement or the monitor. As a keyboard preamp it's terrific. It's got a ton of headroom, works great for the low output of the Rhodes or many of today's keyboards. You can choose some slight distortion/warmth or run clean. The input side takes instrument level or mic, allowing you to use the mic directly into a powered speaker for solo gigs, and piano in the other channel (onboard EQ on the piano usually being OK for these type of gigs). The outputs are balanced XLR and unbalanced 1/4", for whatever you need: PA, bass amp, etc,..You can run them both in parallel so you don't need a DI box. The sounds you can produce are just great and it's quiet. People talk about the must-have gear they always bring with them. I never could have said this before with any piece of gear, but now I can. Thank you to JHS for such a unique, usable, musical, and well thought out product

It just makes everything sound a little better.... even when the eq section is turned off the 2 Lundahl Transformers are still on working their magic! It instantly puts the twang/quack right where it needs to be for Teles/Strats with the eq still off...but if you turn the eq on, switch to "HI" to intensionally clip the mic pre, "Step" set to bottom left then you get Skynard's "Give me Three Steps" perfection after dialing in the Master output & Pre-Vol to suit your guitar. Turn "Step" up one click to get perfect ZZ's "La Grange". This is a box you will have to play with but once you catch on to how it works, you will use it on everything... not just guitar. My entire guitar rig in order is.... REVV Tilt-Overdrive, JHS Colour Box v2, Line 6 HX StompXL, and a 54year old '68 Deluxe Reverb. My son's guitar rig is ... Colour Box v2, Line 6 Helix, and a new all tube '68 Deluxe clone of my original. We both could not be happier with our resent purchases in store at Sweetwater Sound a few weeks ago! My intention is to use a JHS Colour Box v2 on every single mixer input Chanel. If you ever hear negative things from a Colour Box user then they probably can't EQ or mix well either. This box is not for beginners who can't tweak tones. For me it's easy, fast, and my tone is done before it reaches the StompXL for processing.

I Plugged this into the Fx loop of my Mesa V 90 combo and it took about 2 minutes to know this pedal is keeper. Tone for days..

My only complaint is that I didn't buy this two or three years ago when Lucas originally recommended it. I'm just a closet player and probably not even using it to its full potential. Very clean signal path. Fantastic sounds. Really boosted my princeton reissue, especially in conjunction with my existing overdrive pedals. Super easy to dial in your eq preference with sweepable high, mid, and bass. I've got a Taylor acoustic that I've never been happy with the amplified sound, even when using my Fishman loudbox performer, and I know this pedal is gonna cure that anemic tone situation. And it accepts XLR inputs so I can finally use that expensive 1/4" to XLR instrument cable that I bought. I'll probably end up getting a second one for utility situations. Got it with the Christmas sale price, and I don't think I've ever been happier with a pedal purchase

Amazing box into an a/d

Just got this amazing pedal from my buddy who bought it from the best music company on the planet..Sweetwater! This pedal is amazing!! Running it through a vintage 70's Sunn Concert head and '69 Sunn 18in cab. Playing an early 70's Ibanez Lawsuit Jazz bass. The Colour Box is the answer, and made this setup complete. Hard to explain it, but it seemed to polish every aspect of sound. I love the bit of distortion I can get out of it. Keep up your exceptional and personable online service. Don't lose that!! Maybe I'm old, but I still like talking to service reps from companies.

This pedal is a Neve 1073 type channel with lots of extras. Amazing piece of gear for the price!

Used it for a D28 with Lyric mic and achieved sweet, natural,dynamic sound that brought immediate compliments.

This box is an absolute must for any home recording scenario. It makes EVERYTHING you put through it sound incredible! It sounds way better than all the expensive stuff in my api lunchbox. I ran it through my RETRO double wide compressor& I couldn't believe what I was hearing. Well worth 2 or 3 times the price. Truly amazing& incredibly versatile. Everybody should get one. It's made most of my gear obsolete in one small package. Wow.

I love how easily you can shape your tone and even get really close to the overdriven sounds of The Beatle's Revolution and Led Zeppelin's Black Dog with the higher gain setting.

Really loving this preamp! While I have not used it in a live situation, it is proving well worth the price tag in the studio: guitar, bass, electronic drums, acoustic percussion, synth, vocals - you can use it to help shape the sound of anything you are recording. This is a rugged pedal, whose functionality is very well designed. The Hi-Pass works well for zeroing in on the high frequencies and Hi/Lo toggle have proven extremely useful: the Lo mode gives you great headroom for clean sounds, and the Hi mode allows you to get subtle overdrive to pretty hairy fuzz. The Master, Pre-Vol, and EQ settings are all smooth and offer a wide range; I love how the Step works to give you more gain. The input & outputs give you the flexibility of using 1/4" and XLR cables, and that the Colour Box allows Phantom Power to pass through makes it great for using a condenser mic. I want to thank Chris Barry of Sweetwater for always taking the time to get me all the information I need to decide on what gear will best suit my needs and my budget.

What a marvelous little contraption! My singer uses one all the time and I wont record drums without it ever again. My drummer loves it. Not to mention the whole array of tones I'm creating with it on my guitar. I recommend it for anybody, singer, drummer, keyboardist, bass player and who ever else is looking to make a splash with there tone! And I got a break on the price buying it at sweetwater. Couldn't be happier!

Jon Mostacato hooked me up with this pedal because I needed a solution to run my condenser mic through my guitar pedals. This did it. Love it. Additionally the clipping sounds you can get out of this thing are absurd and fantastic to play around with.

I'm a deep admirer of JHS pedals, and I'm pleased to say I finally own what I think is their Holy Grail of pedals—the Colourbox V2. I had always wanted a Colourbox since the original was introduced, but the hefty price tag was the main deterrent for me. Fortunately I got a brief taste of what the Colourbox could do when I settled on its streamlined cousin, the Crayon, which is by far one of my favorite pedals I use, and is a staple on my pedal board. Anyways, a couple years have passed since then and I've been wanting to add more tools to my arsenal of recording gear as a growing audio engineer, and this time when the Colourbox V2 came out, I happened to have the funds to spring for one, and I'm not disappointed...
I have no interest in using this pedal on my board, but instead as a preamp or D/I for tracking. I'm still experimenting with what this baby can do, but so far I love using it with guitar and bass when I record, as well as vocals. Whether I'm going for crisp cleans, or adding some warmth "colour", to full on fuzz, it seems to do it all without ever being too much for my interface or DAW to handle—I also use it in conjunction with my Rupert Neve Stereo D/I, which I feel like gives me the sweetest sound in all my recordings. I plan to do some tracking for drums as well with the mic running into the Colourbox, which I'm excited to see how that does, which I have no doubt will afford me some versatile possibilities in achieving different sounds.
Overall I'm pleased with the Colourbox V2 for it's amazing sounds, and while it would make for a great pedal to use on anyone's pedalboard, I prefer its use for the studio while I keep my Crayon on my board. My friends at Sweetwater also did an amazing job at securely sending me this pedal in a timely manner. Great product, great company—both Sweetwater and JHS!

A great pedal . Really the only one you need . I set the pedal to a high gain . High saturation setting. And with my volume knob I can go from crystal clean , slight drive .to full on sputter .

I bought this primarily for using as a preamp for my mics and for guitar. It is super clean if you want it to be. You can play with the Step, Preamp, and Master knobs to tweak it to your liking. I am using this with a variety of mics and I love how it can sculp the sound and ad color. Glad someone is thinking of products for the modern home studio. An external preamp is overkill and I had a BAE 1073. It was amazing, but this has eq and adds that bit of warmth I wanted before going into my UAD X8 interface. Subtle, but a big difference if you are really into your recorded sound. Great price! Buying two so I can use in stereo.

Been using it for the console fuzz sound, as well as a mic preamp and di for bass. Sounds great for everything i've used it on.

I'm a huge fan of DI guitars (who needs amps?) so this was obviously made for me. Super high quality for the price. The cleans and light saturation are pristine, perfect for clean acoustic or electric and getting a very nice but subtle shimmer to your sound with the simple but very effective EQ. That also makes it a great candidate to feed into another overdrive or distortion pedal. At higher gains, it excels as well, from classic rock to a very sick broken fuzz. Don't get disappointed at first when searching for distortion tones if you find a spot on the gain knob where the pedal behaves a little strangely (stutters or crackups); with small tweaks to the level as well as the gain there's plenty of sweet spots to go around.

Great pedals overall. I bought a pair of these from Sweetwater and love them. My intent is to use these 75% of the time as mic preamps and/or outboard coloration boxes for DAW effects busing and 25% of the time as guitar pedals. In either case these are fun, versatile pedals. One caveat is that the knobs weren't exactly lined up between the two pedals. If you owned only one of these pedals then that would not be any issue at all, however when using them as a matched pair (which is my intent) the knob position discrepancy is something you may need to address. I removed the knobs from both units and very carefully realigned both pedals' knobs to match more closely. This helped a bunch. The Master and Pre-Vol knobs are especially sensitive to being exactly matched (especially when the Step knobs are at max gain) as even a thick guitar pick's thickness-of-a-knob-rotation (1mm-ish?) affects the gain and texture of the pedal quite a bit. That's pretty cool that there's that much going on under the hood yet I almost wish the Master and Pre-Vol knobs were micro-stepped for consistency. Something else I've noticed is that if you stack two of these Colour Boxes (in serial) with a guitar, the first pedal will be a tad darker/thicker and less fuzzy than the second pedal in the line. At first I thought I was over-analyzing them but when I swapped the order of the two pedals the first one in series (which had originally been the second in line) became slightly darker/thicker and the second one (which had originally been the first in line) became slightly brighter. Good to know in certain situations, especially if you want to experiment with stacking them. I'm guessing it's an impedance thing that is interacting with the input/output buffers? But once I figured out these quirks I've been quite happy with them and am glad I bought them. If you buy more than one of these units with the intent of using them as a matched set you may want to spend a few minutes calibrating the knob placements. Past that v2's seem to have more personality and less noise than the Colour Box v1. The v2 version is a nice update. Cool niche pedal.

I've used this in live setting for a month as EQ for Martin d28 with lyric mic. I have combined with baggs compressor(1), colour box(2), and baggs chorus (3) pedals.
This pedal removes quackiness from piezo saddle pickups and tames the boomy low end peaks from the Martin/Lyric, resulting in rich, tasty acoustic goodness .
I would advise backing off pre and post volumes below 8 however as there is significant white noise floor to avoid ( the baggs units are silent in this respect)
And if more boost is needed, of course the multiple gain stages are available !!!
OK you get a Five, so much flexibility in this product.

I always thought the Colour Box 500 was a somewhat underrated mic pre. This pedal not only achieves the same quality as the 500 series, but is so perfect for a pedal board as well. This thing brings guitar to life, every string rings out clearly and sings, EQ section is awesome, and the HPF really does wonders, especially when trying to fit into a mix. Josh Scott has done it again.

I was lucky enough to grab an Open Box Demo unit of these magic boxes at substantial savings over street price. Big thanks to my long-time sales rep, Brendan Murphy, for his help.
I have used the Colour Box 2 as a vocal mic preamp, an acoustic guitar DI and in front of my guitar amp. In each case the result was a more focused, richer sound. The EQ section is very musical and lush. Its sound sculpting ability is unmatched by anything I've ever plugged into. Its got gain for days. Highly recommended.

Guys, this pedal is the real deal! I’ve had it a couple days and have really put it through it’s paces. I’ve used it as a boost, EQ, overdrive, distortion, and fuzz through my guitar. I’ve also used it as a tone-shaping device and gain for my voice and as a DI solution for my acoustic. It’s amazing how versatile it is, but beyond that, how great it excelled at everyone of these tasks. I’m thinking a second one may be in my future soon!

It's simply one of the best pedals I have purchased and I've purchased too many! Stealing from Josh, it's more loud which is good, and it's an easy button for more good sound. I use it to shape the sound of other pedals and also as a stand alone for overdrive to glitchy fuzziness. It's a versatile tone machine. No regrets pulling the trigger on this purchase.