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Gear used in this demo
- Guitar: PRS S2 Starla in the humbucker position.
- Amp: Vox Night Train (15 watt) into a 1×12 cab loaded with an Eminence Red Fang speaker
- Recording chain: Shure SM 57 into a Behringer X32 mixing desk
Pedal Description
The Soul Food is a boost/overdrive pedal based on the original Klon Centaur. The Klon is a very sought after and rare pedal, and prices on Ebay can get up to $2000 for the original. Compare that to the Soul Food at under $70.
The Soul Food has 3 knobs:
- Volume: controls volume level
- Treble: acts as sort of a tone control
- Drive: acts as a gain control
What we like
The Soul food sounds great. It’s more of a transparent overdrive, as opposed to something like a Tube Screamer which adds a lot of midrange and other EQ kinds of tone shaping. Because of that, the Soul Food won’t really color your amp’s tone a lot – it will just overdrive it beautifully.
Like the Klon, it works especially well as more of a boost – turn the drive down and the volume up and it will push your amp nicely. It does add grit, even with the drive at zero (if your volume is up), so it’s not a clean boost, but it sounds great.
Turn up the drive and you get some really smooth overdrive. It’ll get pretty raunchy if you go all the way up.
The Soul Food also plays pretty well with other pedals – use it in a stacked overdrive type of setting to push another drive and it works really well. It’s also pretty responsive to pick attack.
What we don’t like
There’s not much to say here – the Soul Food delivers. If we have to complain, the treble knob gets really obnoxious and nasty if you turn it up much past noon. It’s not quite as rich and pleasant as the original Klon (we find the Soul Food lacks a little something in the midrange), but overall, we don’t have many complaints on this one.
If you’re looking for an inexpensive dirty boost or overdrive, you really can’t go wrong with the Soul Food.
