Jackson Audio Golden Boy Mini

The Jackson Audio Golden Boy Mini is a transparent overdrive pedal designed in collaboration with Joey Landreth of The Bros. Landreth, and it distills the company's full-size Golden Boy into a smaller, simpler format. Jackson Audio describes it as a pedal that "preserves the character of your guitar and amplifier while adding warmth, harmonic detail, and depth"¹. It launched in July 2023 at $179².

The circuit family is the important context here. The original Golden Boy is based on the Bluesbreaker and King of Tone circuit, which MusicRadar calls "the classic drive versatility of the Bluesbreaker and King Of Tone"³, and the Mini carries that lineage into a 2.5 × 4.25 inch enclosure with top-mounted jacks¹. Jackson Audio suggests it works well stacked before another drive pedal or an amplifier already beginning to break up¹.

A transparent Blues Breaker-style overdrive

The Golden Boy line began as a Blues Breaker variant designed with Joey Landreth⁴, and the full-size pedal grew out of Jackson Audio's Broken Arrow overdrive, adding four clipping presets, a boost circuit and MIDI control⁴⁵⁶. The Mini strips that back: two clipping voices instead of four, a toggle switch instead of presets, and no boost circuit or MIDI.

What survives is the tone goal. The maker describes the resulting character as very open, uncompressed and transparent, and in the manual suggests thinking of "John Mayer overdriven tones"⁶. Guitar.com's review of the original found the blue drive mode "creating natural, uncompressed break-up with blooming sustain"⁷.

Landreth's own view of the pedal he helped design:

Delicious Audio reports that Landreth uses the Golden Boy tone "night in and night out on tour"⁴.

The controls: gain, three-band EQ and clipping switch

The Mini's control set is a gain knob, volume, and a three-band active EQ, plus a toggle for the clipping voice⁴¹.

The EQ is the same Baxandall-style design as the full Golden Boy. The manual describes it as studio-grade, based on "the legendary Baxandall EQ that is featured in countless studio EQ's," tailored for guitarists, with a flat response at the 12:00 position and ±12dB of boost or cut per band⁶. The maker's page for the full pedal confirms the same ±12dB range on bass, middle and treble⁸. Center detents on the pots make it easy to return to flat⁶.

For lead sounds, Jackson Audio suggests raising the gain for harmonic sustain, then using the middle and treble controls to add definition without making the sound harsh¹.

LED versus asymmetrical clipping

The two voices on the toggle come from the four the full Golden Boy offers. Jackson Audio's descriptions of each¹⁸⁴:

• Asymmetrical: three silicon diodes clip each side of the waveform differently, which the maker says produces a lively feel with detailed pick attack and more harmonic texture¹⁸.
• LED: two LEDs clip the waveform symmetrically with much higher headroom, giving a wider, less-compressed response that feels closer to an amplifier beginning to break up¹⁸.

In the full pedal's manual, the LED voice is labeled "Vintage Marshall," and the asymmetrical voice sits between the Tube Screamer-style symmetrical mode and the four-diode symmetrical mode⁶.

Golden Boy versus Golden Boy Mini

The Mini is not simply a smaller box. Delicious Audio notes the two units are actually similar in size, and that the Mini is a streamlined version rather than a shrunken one⁴. The real differences are in features:

Guitar Pedal X's review of the full pedal notes that its presets store only the clipping setting, boost setting and gain cycle level, not full knob values⁹. The Mini removes that layer entirely: what you set on the knobs is what you get.

Finishes and buying

The Mini comes in three anodized finishes: gold, black, and rose gold¹. At launch, Guitar.com reported the black finish was limited to 1000 units and rose gold to 500². The maker also sells a Mystery Color option covering Gold, Rose Gold and Black, and offers both New and B-Stock conditions, with orders expected to ship within 3 to 4 weeks¹.

Where it sits in the Jackson Audio line

The Golden Boy itself is Jackson Audio's best-selling pedal, according to MusicRadar³, and the company has since applied the same recipe, a Baxandall-style EQ plus signature collaboration, to pedals including the Asabi with Mateus Asato and The Optimist with Cory Wong. The Mini is the entry point to that line: the core Golden Boy drive and EQ, at $179, without the programmable extras.

Videos

Click to load

Click to load

Click to load

News

Questions