Joyo JF-15 California Sound Effects Pedal with Modern Ultra-High Gain Amp Simulator and Unique Voice Control

Wife's account, my pedal! Traveling musician with two albums. This distortion/OD pedal is the best bang for the buck I ever spent! All knobs have direct impact on tone! I've never played a boogie, so I cant comment on if it sounds like one. With my Les Paul I can get JCM 800 tones out of it. It definitely has Santana esque tones in lower gain settings with great sustain. With my hotrodded Tele in lower gain it does Jazz and Country, very articulate. Higher gain sounds like a hotrodded tweed amp. If you are a gear head like me, will want three or four of these on your board because you will easily find 4 settings you want. Fortunately, the price is cheap enough 4 of these cost similar to one name brand OD. If you are not a gearhead, you can point all the knobs to 12:00 and it sounds great! If you change gain or voice settings, you may need to tweek EQ. It sounded great low and high gain with my Tone Corset Compressor. I wouldn't say it works very well in chain with other OD's. Its not really necessary. Plenty of gain and sustain. I'm not really a modern metal player. I did drop D and chug with it... but I would not say it was in Triple Recto territory, which I have played. Everything seems sturdy, metal housing, True Bypass, not noisy. I hope I didn't bore you to death. I rarely leave reviews, but this is a cool pedal! I recommend this pedal. You cant beat it for price.

I first got the ACTONE pedal, it was great. I ended up buying the American, British, and California pedals as well. All 4 for less than the price of one more expensive pedal. I already had the Nova System, for effects, playing into a Fender 65 Princeton Reverb Reissue but wanted some additional amp models. I now have a full pallet of choices. They all sound great in front of the Nova. The 3 tone, drive, and voice knobs give many delightful options. They are all a bit different, and I noticed using humbuckers, single coils, and P90s all give more options. The pedals add a fulness and hearty quality in front of the Nova System. They sound far better for recording than my software amp models in Logic, I bypassed my Princeton went direct into Logic - they sound full and not digital. Great value, and quality tones. All for for about $130. Can't beat it. They are not a heavy metal sound, but I did not want that. Rather you can dial in just about any classic rock overdrive or clean tone you want. Delighted.

Sustain for DAYS. Insane. Just keeps going and going. I've played this pedal through an Ibanez Artist w/ Slash Seymour Duncan Pickups (amazing guitar and pickups!) , Epiphone SG Pro with DiMarzio Crunch Lab pickups, and Fender Mexi Strat w/Custom Shop 69 pickups and a Vox and a Fender for reference. This pedal, like my other joyo pedals (Fuzz, Ultimate Drive, Digital Delay) is great bang for the buck. I do have some name brand pedals - Zack Wylde OD & Ibanez Tube Screamer. They all do different things...and I like them all. For this pedal - interesting surprise as far as sound. I would say that the "voice" pedal which probably makes you wonder the most about acts more like cabinet and amp emulation to me. Some may call the sound it produces something else. But sufficed to say - the pedal gets more gain and sounds more 'airy' and more like a mic'd cabinet as you drive the Voice up, in my opinion. The Voice knob almost adds more Gain than the Gain does. By themselves - cranking the gain or the voice all the way up with the other all the way down - does not produce much of any distortion. Combined - as you raise them together - the sound gets 'bigger' and you get more distortion, gain, sustain - your amp will sound 'fuller' and the headroom and bass increases. I suspect this is how all the Joyo emulating pedals work. This is also why they are marketing this pedal as a amp emulator and direct recording device. You feel that bigger, airy sound as those two knobs go up. Opens it up with more headroom - best description. I'm keeping the Gain all the way up, the Voice at about 10 o'clock - Bass low - mids and trebs high. This is a 'bassy' sounding pedal with lots of low end headroom - doesn't break up but definitely gives some fullness. As you up the Voice - the gain goes crazy w/out feedback or high amounts of noise - a testament to the quality in my book. Being the 3rd Joyo Pedal I've picked up - it's getting harder and harder for me to justify the cost of some of the upper priced pedals with how much I like and use the Joyo's. The difference you'll see in my book - touch sensitivity and dynamics will be better on those higher end pedals, but these Joyo pedals are uh-mazing for the money. Can't wait to try it on a stack - I'll consider editing this review on how well it holds up at louder volumes with a Marshall solid state head & 4x12 cab I have access to. On a clean channel'd amp - by itself - this pedal has enough smooth gain and sustain to be the only dist. pedal you need at any one time time. Combined with a tube screamer or similar - forget about it. With gain and sustain that lasts this long - the type of music you can play - especially heavy / hard rock and leads - opens up immensely. Perfect for progressive rock. Low noise, good sound quality. Adding delay with this pedal yielded some great "Tool" like sounds circa Lateralus in my book. If you are on the fence on this one - ask yourself - do I want a high-gain pedal with lots of sustain and headroom? If the answer is yes - consider buying it. If you are looking for something with a scooped mid and a 'tight' response - this is not a "Metal Zone" pedal. As for how close it sounds to a Mesa - I'm not sure. In my book - there's no way a pedal can emulate the gain, headroom and touch sensitivity of a real Mesa...but this pedal has some of those characteristics. I will say I'm judging this pedal on it's own merit rather than what it's trying to clone. On it's own - just a distortion pedal with a "mic'd up cabinet", super gain, super sustain feel to it - it's great.

It's a good little pedal, for a great price! Don't expect the world from it. You get what you pay for, usually. However, if you spend some time with it though, you can get some great moderate distorted sounds from it with the voice control around 25% and the mids and highs boosted a little. Try cutting the bass a little for some definition. With the voicing control all the way up, it's too "flubby" and noisy. Not to say someone couldn't find that sound useful. I could not get a good metal "chug" or "djent" sound out of it. Then again, it could be my rig. The flavor of this pedal would be for more classic rock and blues, in my opinion. I haven't been able to coax a very pure clean tone from it yet, but again, my rig..... I have only tried it direct, so far. When running direct and dry, it can feel a little "stiff" and lacking that "open" feel when you pick or strum. Direct, with a bit of reverb and delay, the sound opens up a bit and can be responsive. I will try it with my Tech 21 Power Engine 60 next. Overall, the pedal is useful, due to the voice control and EQ options. Someone hoping to find a classic rock or blues sound should be fairly happy with this pedal.

I have been playing through an early version A Mesa Mark IV into a 200W EV for 20+years and this pedal captures the rhythm channel quite well. Lots of low end with the distinct Mesa crunch. Turn the voice and drive all the way up and it will come close to the lead channel. Scoop the mids and role the low back some it sounds like my Boogie mic'd (the way I play). For heavier recto type tones, I put a Boss Metal Zone MT-2 in front of it. The Joyo took away the harshness of the Metal Zone and provided great sounding distortion with lots of touch sensitivity into a 65 Princeton Reverb. This will be used often. The pedal quality is also excellent. All of the knobs feel tight and the pedal has some weight. This is a surprisingly good effects pedal! Also worth noting is that many Joyo Pedals are true Bypass (These have "True Bypass" printed below the switch), but this one is not. The I/O buffers used appear to be very good though as I tested it and there was no noticeable tone degradation in the circuit.

TAKE NOTE: Mine came with a defective battery and I thought the unit was defective. The company I ORDERED IT FROM didn't think to suggest it could be the dying battery that was giving me trouble with too much hissing and a distorted very low volume in the clean setting. I HAD TO FIGURE THAT OUT ON MY OWN!! I hate it when I have to do the thinking for the company I ordered the unit from. This is something THEY should have suggested. Instead they had no suggestions whatsoever. That really steams me up. However, having the unit function properly with a 9v adapter is taking the edge off my anger. Well, so far the pedal is everything it was advertised to be. I'll have to get used to it, but I am relieved the problem was the battery and not the unit. I was impressed by videos showing how much range each of these adjustment dials has. That is not usually the case with such units. When you turn any one of these dials it really makes A big difference!! I got this mostly for recording, but intend to use it to make any amp have a thick, juicy lead guitar sound. UPDATE: There is nothing in the instructions about this, but I now strongly suspect that if you leave guitar cables plugged into the unit, even with the activation light off, it still drains battery juice!

This was supposed to be an all-in-one boogie sound, but when recording direct you will need some form of cab simulator. The distortion is great and very amp-like, except at extreme EQ settings. It also works well with other pedals, including overdrives. The cab sim in my digitech hot head (all analog, despite being made by digitech) is much better. I use this pedal with the hot head cabinet simulator, or vst cabinet simulators. Overall though, I would suggest saving for an actual tech 21 character series pedal. Eventually just gave it away. Average tone and no resale value.

While this poor pedal recently got replaced in my recording setup by Amplitube 4, I will be keeping it. As many others have said, this pedal will give you a Mesa Boogie tone. Although I have had an opportunity to play a Mesa Boogie amp, it was a small combo amp. I will say that this pedal sounds very close to some of the Mesa Boogie tones I have loaded in Amplitube, however. And one individual who listened to a song that I recorded using this pedal remarked that my tone sounded quite a bit like that of Carlos Santana. I'm not one to nitpick on authenticity in matters like this though, I was simply looking for a pedal that would give me a great clean, overdriven, and distorted amp tone, and this pedal nailed it, regardless if it truly does sound like a Mesa Boogie amp or not. While this isn't a plug and play unit, taking the time to dial it in truly will get you great clean (and I mean clean, not very lightly overdriven) tone. I have the greatest difficulty dialing in mild overdrive tones, particularly crunch with more midrange. I can't really fault the pedal though, since most want Mesa Boogie tone for outrageous distortion. And, that, is where this pedal is at home. It'll pump out gobs of gain before you ever even turn the gain knob to a high level. So, if you need a "amp in a pedal" and need versatility, I recommend giving this a good look. If you want high gain for metal tone (or tone that is like Carlos Santana's I suppose), this is definitely a pedal worth considering. I've had this pedal for nearly a year now, and while it rarely gets used now, it still works fine. Bear in mind I don't gig or literally stomp on my boxes. Since this one was used as an amp, it was kept on a desktop and switched on by hand, so I can't really comment on durability.