Caline makes a guitar pedal called the CP-14 English Man. There is an earlier version that was a lime green, and there is a newer version that looks like the British flag. This is a clone of the drive channel of the Carl Martin dual channel PlexiTone guitar pedal. The Carl Martin PlexiTone dual channel pedal is a bigger pedal with it’s own dedicated power cord. You may not need the boost, having the high gain channel alone in a single pedal is awesome. The cost of the PlexiTone is between $200 and $300.
Carl Martin does make a single channel version of the PlexiTone, the gold one. Even though this should be the same as the English Man pedal many say that version has higher mids than the drive on black dual channel one. The Plexi tone is essentially a Marshall in a box. You can nail that 80’s and 90’s hair metal and heavy rock sound. Everything from Judas Priest to Van Halen and back. Some reviews have said that the original green version had a high pitched 8kHz whine noise when you were not playing that was practically unbearable.
There were some people that modified (even the new version of the English Man), by by putting a .1 cap across the tone pot lugs – which really seemed to smooth it out. Another thing you should know is that this pedal does not take a 9 volt battery, only AC power (because of the up-converting chip). Another modification that many have made is to change the IC chip with one that runs at much higher frequency (outside of hearing range). You can pop out the one that is in the socket and replace it with a TC1044S or ICL7660S. Both of those replacement chips cost less than $1. Read more about some modifications people have made over at the gear page.
The funny thing is that despite some people having complaints, if you watch the video reviews on YouTube none of them have that high pitched whine. So maybe it depends on the amp or volume you use the pedal at – not sure. You can purchase the English Man pedal for under $30 on Amazon. This is a great pedal to modify, and as you’ll see in many of the demo videos great out of the box as well. Tobin Abasi plays the Carl Martin PlexiTone version, you can buy the clone and try it out for almost a tenth of that cost.
Here is a video demo of the English Man
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