Electro Harmonix Crayon 69 Full-Range Overdrive

Electro Harmonix have a lot of cool pedals and some of them are really weird. This one is just a straightforward overdrive pedal with separate treble and bass knobs. The marketing is full of buzz words: it's supposed to be a "full range" overdrive and words like "smooth" are used to describe it.

I find the pedal to be nothing spesial and definitely not "smooth". I might agree with "full range" if that means it delivers all the nasty high frequencies you would normally want to filter out of a distorted guitar sound. Basically it's just a boring and slightly harsh sounding overdrive. If I had to compare to a more widely known pedal I would say it sounds like a more harsh sounding OCD. The harshness can be reduced using the tone controls but unfortunately the tone controls aren't very good. Unless used very sparingly they sound really bad. Raising the treble is not a good idea as it sounds really harsh. IT seems to boost frequencies far above what is normally considered "nice" for distorted guitar. But lowering the treble doesn't work either as is sounds dull and uninspiring really fast. The high control seems to have a much too wide range, destroying the upper midrange when lowering it and boosting too high frequencies when boosting. Same with the bass knob, raising it makes everything muddy. It seems to somehow work with the wrong frequencies. Lowering the bass knob makes everything too thin. It seems to raise/reduce the entire lower midrange AND the bass range, far too wide a range to be useful.

The gain knob also has a pretty wide range, which could have been cool. Unfortunately it doesn't sound nice in the lower "edge of breakup" settings. It's just to hard/metallic sounding for that. And after 12 o'clock there's not a lot of difference, it basically sounds the same from around 12 o'clock and upwards.

I guess this pedal sounds okay with higher gain settings if you need that full chord hammering "wall of sound" type of overdrive but that's just about the only thing this pedal sounds ok for. And there are other pedals that do this better.

Also, it doesn't play nicely with other pedals. Stuff that would normally work with similar sounding pedals, like running a TS-style pedal into it, just sounds... bad.

It's ok for the price I guess but there are LOTS of better overdrive pedals out there, even in a similar price range and also within EHXs own range. I generally like EHX overdrive/fuzz pedals but sadly not this one.

Build quality... well it SEEMS ok but it's EHX so basically you can expect it to break down at any time. Or it might work flawlessly for years. You never know with EHX.

Not recommended. At least try before buying.

I don't know a lot of tone-shaping for electric guitar. I just think I have some how good taste. I bought this ONLY thinking about a not so harsh- high gain overdrive pedal with more than a "tone" knob for EQ. So this made the first filter only by the looks. Then, I didn't want to spend more than 100 dlls. Filter two check. OK. I got it. I started trying it. I liked it. It has a tone of volume - (headroom - whatever that is) - and the bass knob adds nice low, tight end. After a couple of months, I started trying to understand a bit more of this freaking addictive never-ending interest for OD pedals. Eventually I bumped into certain claimings of individuals saying this is the take of EHX on the TIMY. I didn't find a straightforward statement from EHX saying it is their take on the TIMMY, but I did a google search saying "EHX take on the TIMMY" and hundreds of links about the Crayon 69/76 popped up. Now I have a Timmy. The timmy is a wonder, and the Crayon is nothing like that. What I have found agis, though, that this Crayon sounds very similar to the J.Rokkett THE DUDE, which is the Rockett effects company's take on the DUmble tone. To be honest. I don't like the Dumble videos I've watched. But the couple of videos I watched certainly show the pedals sounding very alike. So, you'll get a TONE of headroom, and great tight bass, and a wide-range of gain with a quite controllable treble on the Crayon, and for very reasonable bucks. Ok, off to play my crayon :-)

4 stars because the footswitch feels as cheap as the pedal is cheap actually. :-P
And the tone is great but not aaaas we wish it really was. Also this doesn't offer different clippings as others do.

Still super good product.

I needed a soft distortion pedal to do some dirty cleans (e.g.: Mastodon's The Hunter, The Sparrow, Thickening). That clean sound that has a bit of dirt in its end, that's how I interpret it...

I previously bought a Little Big Muff to that end, but I soon learned that it wasn't suitable for the sound I was looking for. I than used my amps heavy distortion soften with a volume pedal to cut the guitar signal. The sound was near what I envisioned but it lacked on presence and brightness.

I decided to get a non expensive overdrive pedal, that could get really soft and offer more EQ control than a single Tone knob. And I found this. After owning lots of EHx pedals (besides the Little Big Muff) I trusted the brand and I didn't get disappointed.

The distortion knob can go from very very subtil to very intense, without getting into fuzz territory. The volume pedal acts as expected, muting the pedal, compensating from the volume loss/increase of the distortion knob or really boosting the signal. The bass and Treble offer great tone shaping, they can really be boosted or cut, and bring some meds in in the process, and they are certainly more versatile than just a single Tone knob. However it would be perfect with a mid knob, and certainly easier to find the right sound.

I am very satisfied with the pedal, to those dirty cleans it is perfect, to some delay play (The Edge like) it make some notes crash beautifully and to spark a more subtil solo it is great!

To my knowledge this pedal is based on the famous BB Preamp Pedal, and at such a gentle price it's hard to say no to it. In particular I'm a large fan of being able to turn up the bass and treble, retaining the gain characteristics of a mid-hump overdrive without it thinning out my sound. There's a particular resonance around 2-3khz in the tone stack that you'll very much like if you're into aggressive, bitey, clanky sounds, though it can get overbearing into amps and cabs that already heavily emphasise this frequency range.

The quality of these pedals however, I'm less enthusiastic about. My first unit would occasionally go into self-oscillation when turned on and had become microphonic, amplifying vibration and handling noise as sound. Electro Harmonix sent a replacement unit, however this unit also displayed microphonic behaviour right out of the box. At bedroom level by simply stacking on a particularly large amount of gain, I've managed to get the pedal to squeal like a microphone feeding back, and I wager that if you use it to push a metal amp at gigging levels, as is custom to do with an overdrive, the same may happen. Tap-testing the boards revealed at least 6 faulting capacitors on the original unit and 4 on the replacement. I want to love this pedal, as it is beautiful, fantastic sounding, and inexpensive, but my experiences do not suggest it to be particularly dependable.

I ordered this pedal hoping to get a decent blues/funk crunch sound out of it and ended up with so much more. You can dial in an array of different overdriven tones due to the very responsive bass and treble controls. The gain is nice and tight, articulate and abundant. Not growling or muddy. Even at lower levels of overdrive the sound is clear and musical. Blues or Funk chords don't sound harsh, but rather have a nice bite to them. You can also make a solo on your neck humbucker really cut through the mix thanks to treble control or fatten up a solo on a bridge humbucker with the bass control. With the gain at maximum you get a nice singing solo sound that sound great combined with other effects. I use it to get a crunch tone then kick in the EHX OD Glove and get a ripping and rocking lead tone for Hot Blues/Funk solos but this pedal can be used in an array of settings and styles. In my opinion, this pedal offers just as much as pedals costing twice as much do. So I strongly recommend it!