Centavo is a recreation of a very popular and desirable overdrive pedal from the '90s called the Klon Centaur. Used prices for a vintage Centaur pedal run from $1,900 to over $3,000!
Warm Audio's Centavo uses hand-selected components including TL072 op amps and vintage diodes. The Centavo will produce clean boost tones, transparent overdrives and at its dirtiest, good grit using hard clipping. You get the MOD slide switch on the back of the unit; it was called for by the late, great Jeff Beck on the original pedal who wanted the low frequencies extended by lowering the corner frequency of the high pass filter. We leave this activated at all times because it just sounds fatter. Like the Klon pedal, Centavo has large Gain, Treble, and Output controls on the front panel. The pedal copies the gold color of the original and is housed in a single, sturdy die-cast aluminum box. Centavo is powered by a single 9-volt battery and has a jack for an external power supply. I tested the Centavo in my studio with my guitar player, producer Mikal Reid, who easily got many great choices/sounds for overdriven tones and solos that were more on the clean side of town. We both like the amount of clean gain as well as edgy, "near breakup" tonalities. We mostly ran the Gain control "dimed out," the Treble at 9 o'clock and the Output way down around 3pm. This setup along with a stock '60s Telecaster produced an excellent tracking guitar sound as well.
The Warm Audio Centavo sells for $179.00 MSRP.
