Walrus Audio Iron Horse LM308 V3

The Iron Horse is our take on a classic distortion circuit that’s thick, punchy, riffy, and rowdy. With the help of the Si/LED (Silicon/LED) knob and wide range of the distortion knob, this true bypass, high-gain behemoth can be finely tuned for clear overdriven sounds or let the reigns loose for a full-on distorted onslaught.

Top mount jacks with soft switch bypassing and art by David Hüttner complete the package for a pedal board-ready distortion machine.

The Iron Horse V3 updates are as follows:

• Top-mounted jacks
• Soft relay true bypass on/off
• Fixed volume drop-off when the distortion knob is at minimum
• Re-imagined the hard clipping toggle as a blend style potentiometer, that allows you to blend between symmetrical silicon and diode clipping for a new variety of tones.

Owners of the previous versions of the Iron Horse will be familiar with the three distortion modes operated by a toggle switch to change between different clipping modes. The switch has now been replaced with a blending knob opening up a wealth of ways to alter your tone.

When the knob is set to the left, the distorted signal will be using Silicon clipping diodes adding in a high amount of compression. Rotating the knob to the right will bring in LED clipping and a smaller amount of compression. Putting the knob at noon will blend between the two using different ratios of the Silicone and LED clipping diodes for more complex clipping sounds.

Note: Since the Si/LED knob is changing the internal gain and clipping style, the other controls will behave slightly differently as well. You will need to use the volume knob to adjust the overall output up or down depending on where you have the knob set.