VOX Valvenergy Silk Drive Distortion/Overdrive Pedal

General

The sound of a legendary American boutique amp in pedal form; who wouldn't want that? This Silk Drive from VOX's Valvenergy series offers you the warm tones from clean to bluesy and does so with tremendous dynamics. Every nuance of touch can be heard and felt, and the compression so typical of tube amps can be found in the sound of this pedal. The five controls on the pedal are: Volume, Gain, Bass, Middle, Treble and a Bright switch. The first four are pretty self-explanatory, but the Bright switch is particularly interesting if you want to change the character of the overdrive. A feature of the Valvenergy series pedals is that they all feature a Nutube tube. This is responsible for the natural compression, dynamics, headroom and harmonic distortion that is so typical of tube amplifiers.

Three connection options

Part of what makes the pedals in the Valvenergy series unique is the fact that you can choose how you want to use them. With the three options called: 'Standard', 'Preamp' and 'Cab-Sim', you can choose a mode that best suits your application. With the 'Mode' switch in 'Standard' mode, the instrument-level output signal is fed to your guitar amp. In 'Preamp' mode, the line-level output signal is connected to the 'Return' input of your amp or to the output of a power amplifier. This is how you use the Silk Drive as a preamp. Finally, 'Cab-Sim' allows you to send the output signal with speaker simulation directly to your DAW or to a mixing console.

Practical switching function

The Silk Drive also has a real switching function that actually simulates channel switching on your amp. This allows you to link two pedals together by using a standard 3.5 mm (stereo) jack cable connected to the 'Link' connector on the pedal. You can thus switch one pedal on and put the other in 'bypass' mode. It's then like switching channels on your guitar amp. It is possible to link up to three pedals when using a split-Y 3.5 mm stereo cable to switch between three 'channels'. A high-contrast OLED display has been added to provide you with information on what influence the controls have on the waveform. This is shown by an oscilloscope.