Thorn Soundlabs Pedals | Review

Thorn Soundlabs Pedals | Review

Nashville-based pedal manufacturer Thorn Soundlabs have made quite a splash since their debut in 2024. Offering an extensive range of pedals ranging from compressors and tremolos through to bass-specific preamps and distortions - all replete with a huge range of tone-sculpting possibilities thanks to an expansive (but not over-complicated) control set. While Thorn were kind enough to send their entire range for review, that’s a huge undertaking for a single video. We all know guitar players love gain pedals though, so we took a look at four of their best dirt pedals.

The Bad Cash is a green “Screamer” type pedal, which I’m sure will have many of you rolling your eyes and exclaiming “does the world really need another TS-style pedal?”. That’d be a fair comment if it weren’t for the absolutely massive range of tones this pedal can produce. It’ll do the classic “green booster” tone with the best of them, offering a juicy midrange-forward push that’s ideal for soulful blues lines or pushing your 5150 over the edge, but it also has more than enough gain, low end density and high end extension to be a one-and-done pedal for your entire overdrive sound.

The Silver Spurs is a Marshall-In-A-Box with a difference. While the vast majority of MIAB pedals out there aim to capture the sound of a Super Lead, or maybe a JCM800, the Silver Spurs is an emulation of the aggressive, mid-rich tone of a Marshall Silver Jubilee. Honestly, it absolutely rocks. The compression, the harmonic content, the howl on big bends… all absolutely on the money. There’s also more than enough room on the 4-band EQ to match the Silver Spurs to any amp you happen to be running it into. The acid test for any pedal of this kind is how well it handles the wide-open top end and inherent midrange scoop of an AC30 style amp, and through our Victory Copper, the Silver Spurs absolutely excelled.

I love a fuzz, it’s no secret. The Black Swamp is an absolute gem of a fuzz pedal though. With a hugely full-featured EQ, the a Character switch to control how open or choked-off the pedal gets, a switchable hard clipping mode to take the edge off brittle amps and a very useful Damping control to either snug up the low end or blow it out completely, it’s a real Swiss Army Knife of a fuzz pedal. It likes clean amps, it likes dirty amps, it likes both single coils and humbuckers… what’s not to love here?

The Magma Metal Distortion is an interesting beast, because it occupies an interesting space in the pedal market - a one-and-done distortion pedal, but for Metal players. Typically, Metal guitar players are either “amp distortion” people, or use modellers for their distortion sounds. But as a member of a touring Heave Metal band myself, I can extoll the virtue of having a distortion box like this in your gig bag - even just for emergencies! It’s perfectly happy running into a clean amplifier, or into the front-end of the most ubiquitous gainy backline amp - namely a JMC800. The addition of an in-built noise gate is a very welcome feature, and eliminates the need for a separate pedal to keep noise and feedback under control.

Thorn Soundlabs pedals are designed in Nashville (something that fills me with confidence, as they’ll no doubt have been play-tested by some of the best guitarists in Music City), but they’re manufactured in China, which explains the very reasonable asking price considering how much range each pedal offers. All of the pedals looked at in this review offer huge tonal shaping possibilities, and really deliver the good sonically. If you’re in search of a new overdrive pedal (and let’s be honest, who isn’t?), you should check these out at your earliest convenience!

Find out more at: https://www.thorn-soundlabs.com