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With participants in the great Klon arms race looking beyond the constraints of nailing the Centaur sound, we’re hearing how wonderful variations on the theme can be. Oddfellow’s Bishop makes no specific claims to Klon-ness, but the sonic likenesses are unmistakable and the differences are intriguing, practical, and full of possibilities.
Removing the backplate from the Bishop reveals little about the circuit. Oddfellow inverted the circuit board, so you can’t see what components actually populate it. The upside is that you don’t have to hunt for the very practical true bypass/buffer switch. There’s also room for a 9V battery just adjacent to the board-mounted footswitch.
To my ear, the Bishop is fundamentally very Klon-like, though at most settings it dwells on the darker end of the Klon spectrum. At equivalent settings with my own Klon clone, the Bishop is darker and you have to open up the treble by an additional third to get the same airiness and tonality. The differences are more than treble range, though. There’s just a touch of TS-style compression (the kind I really like), and the combination of the darker tendencies and that trace of TS boxiness make the Bishop a killer match for trebly single-coils and hotter humbuckers. It’s also lends softer contours to British amps with a tendency for spiky transients without stripping the signal of top-end punch.
The Bishop is not a hair-singeing, high-gain affair. And at first, the gain control can seem to lack range—at least in the sense that it doesn’t flirt with metal distortion textures. Whether this is a plus or minus is totally subjective. But I loved the subtle shades and gradients of distortion that you get in trade. And what the gain control might lack in range, it makes up for in fine-tuning accuracy—especially when you use the equally effective tone control with care.
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