Last month, we continued our steak of reviewing excellent pedals from our friends at NUX, with the amazing Duotime Dual Engine Delay. Today, we’ve got another one from their impressive Verdugo Series of Stomboxes: the Queen of Tone Dual Overdrive. Bringing two different but extremely complimentary drive circuits to the table, this 2-for-1 gives you just about all the overdrive options you could need…and maybe a couple more, too…
On the left side of the pedal is the NUX Horseman with an additional SILVER mode. The Horseman is based on the legendary Centaur, with a modified circuit to access the secondary function by simply holding the foot switch~ SILVER mode. Carve out your tone with the Output, Treble, and Gain knobs, then try switching between the 2 modes: Gold and Silver, which offers massive headway usually requiring an 18v input. Gold Mode mimics its classic predecessor, the transparent Gold Centaur overdrive pedal, and the Silver Mode is a powered-up version with an extended gain range (Silver Centaur).
On the right side of the pedal is the NUX Morning Star with an additional SHINE mode. The Morning Star is based on the legendary Bluesbreaker circuit: a very transparent, low gain drive. Like the Morning Star, it also features a simple foot switch hold to engage the iconic SHINE mode for a crystal clear treble boosted tone.
By using the versatile routing and toggle switches, you can adjust the order of the overdrives: MS->HM or HM->MS. On the back of the pedal, you can toggle the BF/TB switch for Buffer-Bypass or True-Bypass, and the IFS/NORMAL switch can engage an INPUT FET STAGE (IFS) to increase the input signal in order to reach the amp’s breakthrough edge, driving a tube amplifier hotter.
There are a LOT of drive tones to explore here in the Queen of Tone, and we bet you’ll pretty much dig ’em all. It plays nice with other pedals, sounds great through various amps and has just the right amount of grit on tap to keep things interesting. Thanks so much to the folks at NUX for letting us check out this powerhouse dual drive – hit up their website for more info, and don’t sleep on our demo video below!! Cheers!!
