For any guitarist who loves warm, transparent sounds full of harmonics, the Klon Centaur is surely their Overdrive pedal dream. This pedal has an interesting story to tell, as well as a long list of guitar legends whose secret to their sound comes from using it.
History of Klon Centaur
This Overdrive pedal has been around since 1994 and was the product of exhaustive research by American engineer Bill Finnegan and his MIT classmate Fred Fenningen, as well as the collaboration of several of their friends. Finnegan’s intention was to get a better sound than Ibanez’s Tube Screamer pedal, which was, by then, widely accepted on the market.
Finnegan’s work turned out in an Overdrive effect, capable of doubling the input signal (at 18 volts as something unique in pedals of this type) and using a germanium diode arrangement that would cut the signal without having a tube distortion on top of the signal, which is interpreted as transparent distortion.
Among the outstanding aspects of this pedal is its manufacturing and a circuit board covered in resin to avoid being cloned, this is why its number of models was limited, and thanks to its good performance it made guitarists like Jeff Beck, John Mayer, Joe Perry, Nels Cline, and Matt Schofield would happily install them on their pedalboards.
The manufacture of this pedal ended in 2009, although the manufacturer introduced in 2012 a more accessible overdrive model under the name Klon KTR.
The popularity of the Klon Centaur
The Klon Centaur is one of the few Overdrive effects developed by engineers and not by electronic guitarists, this made its design and performance to be complex and completely different from that of most overdrive pedals; various clones of the Tube Screamer.
The arrival of this pedal meant direct competition with the best overdrive pedal of that time and the need to achieve warmer sounds, full of harmonics, which would eventually give rise to distortion pedals.
Due to the fact that there are only a little more than 8,000 units in the world since they were discontinued, the price for this pedal has managed to rise up to 2000 $ USD, now it is a collector’s item.
PROMETHEUS Overdrive Pedal Clone of Klon Centaur
It is currently possible to find overdrive pedals in the US that are on the same level as a real Klon Centaur, one of them is the PROMETHEUS, a model that can be purchased for just under $200 USD.
This pedal is designed to resemble the sound of the Klon Centaur, so it has three controllers (Gain, Treble, Output) and its sound can be described as sweet to the tone, as it adapts to the signal and increases the gain very well without generating distortion, even at the lowest volumes.
