August 27th, 2026 | Jacob Holdsworth
Green, Gold & Blue – Halcyon Pedals
We have three pedals in our Halcyon range: the Halcyon Green, Gold and Blue. With these pedals, we wanted to take classic overdrive pedals, known and loved by players the world over, and expand their capabilities with our own engineered features and sounds.
If you already know which overdrive is your favourite, choosing the most appropriate Halcyon for you may be a simple choice. If you don’t, you may be looking for more guidance to better understand each pedal and its lineage. In this article, we’ll talk about each pedal’s inspiration and what the Halcyon version adds.
Similarities
All our Halcyon pedals follow a similar format, with variations of the same controls. Each pedal features DRIVE, TONE, OUTPUT and DRY level controls. They also all feature a voicing designed to faithfully match their vintage counterparts, along with a second, custom Origin-designed voicing for an alternative sonic character.
They also feature our Adaptive Circuitry: circuitry designed to create an interactive frequency response based on your playing dynamics. The original inspiration for each pedal is a mid-forward overdrive with an innate voicing that you cannot overcome. Our Adaptive Circuitry allows the strength of this voicing to change in response to your playing. Play hard and driven, and the pedal will have its inspiration’s strong mid-forward voicing. Play softly, and the voicing will fade away, giving you a progressively flatter frequency response and allowing clean and less-driven tones to sound more natural.
Halcyon Green
The Halcyon Green Overdrive models one of the world’s most ubiquitous overdrive designs: the Ibanez TS808 Tube Screamer. This little green box has been found on stages for over 45 years, and its classic crunch has appeared in almost every genre since. The TS808 solves the simple, ever-present guitar tone question of “Where’s my mids?” with an answer of, “They’re all right here.”
It achieves this feat by rolling off almost everything that isn’t in the midrange, creating a useful, albeit nasal, response. This is incredibly useful into mid-deficient amps like Fenders, and it’s a sound you can hear throughout Stevie Ray Vaughan’s catalogue for this reason. It can also be useful in front of a higher-gain sound to reduce the low-frequency content hitting the amplifier, thus tightening up the response.
The Halcyon Green takes this pedalboard staple and expands its abilities, complete with a DRY level control, alternate voicing and Adaptive Circuitry.
Modes – There are two modes on the Halcyon Green: 808 and MOD. The 808 setting replicates the voicing of our original 1979 Ibanez Tube Screamer. The MOD setting delivers our own tweaks, shifting the mid peak up the frequency range and adding a slightly more resonant character that can be useful with humbuckers or higher-gain amps.
Dry Level – The original 808 has a set amount of “dry” signal working its way through the circuit. I say dry, but it isn’t a clean signal going around the clipping circuit, as you might assume. The Tube Screamer allows some frequencies through the clipping circuit with minimal clipping, which gives the impression of a dry signal being present at the output.
The DRY Level control gives you control over how this interaction takes place, so you can get more or less perceived dry signal at the output. This can be helpful when running into a clean amp, where the dry signal can be too obvious and create a weird “thumping” clean sound against the drive.
Adaptive Circuitry – When active, the Adaptive Circuitry allows the pedal’s mid-forward voicing to vary in relation to your playing and how driven the pedal is. When you’re playing and driving the pedal hard, the classic mid-forward voicing is clear. When you start to play softly, hold a note, or set the pedal for less drive, this mid-forward voicing is progressively diminished until it reaches an almost flat response when clean.
This allows for both a tight, mid-forward drive tone and a natural-sounding clean tone, free from the Tube Screamer’s nasal quality, all with an adjustment to your playing technique or by simply turning down your volume knob.
Halcyon Gold
The Halcyon Gold Overdrive adds the iconic, and sometimes contentious, KLON Centaur to the Halcyon line. In the early ’90s, Bill Finnegan and two MIT graduates set out to solve an all-too-common guitar woe: the desire to turn your amp up for ripping overdrive being stomped on by someone else’s desire for you to play at a less deafening volume.
Bill was gigging with a Fender Twin at the time and regularly ran into this issue. Having tried and disliked the previously mentioned Tube Screamer as a solution, he looked to create his own. He wanted something that felt less dynamically and sonically constrained that could solve his problem.
In 1994, Bill finally released the KLON Centaur for $220 (about $500 in 2026 money), and the rest is history. The KLON Centaur has been on the boards of John Mayer, Nels Cline, Jeff Beck, Mark Tremonti, and many, many more. Bill produced around 8,000 units over the pedal’s lifespan, so despite their now high prices, they’ve been common enough to work their way into many rigs and recording studios over the past four decades.
The KLON Centaur is a hard-clipping overdrive, with a more gentle mid-forward sound than the 808. It retains more low-end and has a present high-end. Its tone control acts to roll off this more prominent high-frequency response, so you can dial back any harshness.
The Halcyon Gold takes this pedal and updates it with our own tweaks and features.
Modes – The Halcyon Gold features two mode options: KLN gives you the classic KLON Centaur response, matching the unit we borrowed from Chris Buck during the pedal’s development. MOD mode gives you our own voicing: a more mellow mid-hump with a softer, more compressed clipping character, suited to single-coil pickups and using the pedal with a completely clean amp.
Dry Level – The KLON Centaur blends clean signal with your overdrive sound by using a dual-gang DRIVE control that adjusts the dry level and drive at the same time. The Halcyon Gold splits each of these sections onto its own control, so you have total control over the amount of dry signal in your sound.
Adaptive Circuitry – On the Halcyon Gold, the Adaptive Circuitry takes control of both the overdrive’s voicing and the tone control. When activated, the pedal’s voicing will lessen, and the tone control’s effect will reduce as you play more softly and drive the pedal less. The voicing and tone control will become stronger as you play and drive the pedal harder.
This allows you to set a nice overdriven tone with a well-tamed high-end, then achieve a nice, open-sounding clean tone simply by adjusting your playing or turning down your volume control.
Halcyon Blue
The Halcyon Blue Overdrive takes after the Marshall Bluesbreaker, a ’90s classic that has been modded by countless pedal builders.
The Bluesbreaker was part of a larger ’90s Marshall pedal range, all loosely based on Marshall amps. These were some of the earliest AIAB pedals ever made (though they don’t feel or sound all that close to their inspirations). The Bluesbreaker is based on the Marshall Bluesbreaker amp, of course: the combo version of the JTM45, given the name due to its use by Eric Clapton when he played with John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers.
These pedals weren’t all that popular during their run, nor for many of the years that followed. That was until a couple of things happened.
In 2003, Mike Piera, the man we all lovingly know as Analog Man, released the first version of the now-legendary King of Tone: a modded Bluesbreaker circuit. This was later turned into a dual-channel model, gained DIP switches, and has grown a whole host of selectable options on the order sheet. You may know it for its sound, its purple, hand-stamped enclosure, or its exceedingly long wait list, which is at risk of hitting a decade long.
In 2005, a harbinger of hype was spotted using a Bluesbreaker in their rig: John Mayer. With this, the Bluesbreaker’s fate was sealed. It was to become… a classic. The album Continuum and subsequent tour featured the pedal heavily, and tone chasers began chasing.
The Halcyon Blue brings the original Bluesbreaker sounds, along with our own contribution to the modded Bluesbreaker canon.
Modes – The BB mode recreates the behaviour and sound of the original Marshall pedal. The MOD mode is our own take on the circuit. When developing our MOD mode, we collected all the big-name modded Bluesbreaker pedals and honed in on what we loved about these circuits. What we ended up with was something with an altered clipping characteristic, higher gain, and a warmer response.
Dry Level – The dry level of the Bluesbreaker works alongside the clipping of the circuit, so it will be more noticeable at higher drive settings. In the original pedal, this is static, but in ours, you can adjust exactly how this presents itself. The dry signal also affects the way the pedal tips into its soft-clipping overdrive, so it slightly alters the response too!
Adaptive Circuitry – Just like the other Halcyon pedals, the Adaptive Circuitry affects the voicing and tone control of the pedal. Play harder, and both the voicing and tone control will become stronger; lighter playing will result in a flatter, more natural frequency response.