Menatone Blue Collar

The Menatone Blue Collar is an overdrive pedal, the second pedal design from Menatone, and it produces what the maker describes as "a fat, midrangey tone that loves single coils"¹. Where its sibling, the Red Snapper, is the open sounding pedal of the pair, the Blue Collar was designed specifically for single coil players who want more gain and compression in the middle of the frequency range¹².

The current Blue Collar is point-to-point wired like the original, but in a smaller enclosure with the jacks mounted on top, and it lists at $229¹. Menatone describes it as the higher gain, more compressed take on the Red Snapper circuit, and the two pedals together form the basis of the company's Fish Factory dual overdrive³.

A fat, midrangey overdrive for single coils

Menatone's own description of the pedal is direct: "The Blue Collar produces a fat, midrangey tone that loves single coils"¹. That positions it against brighter, more transparent overdrives. Where the Red Snapper is voiced open, the Blue Collar leans into the midrange, which is the range that helps a single coil guitar sit forward in a band mix rather than disappearing behind it.

The pedal's presence control is the tool for balancing that thickness against clarity. As the Guitar FX Layouts blog put it when covering the early version of the circuit²:

In practice, that means the two voices of the pedal are adjustable: roll the presence back for a thicker, rounder drive, or push it up so the pick attack cuts through the mix².

The controls

The control set is small and focused. The presence control is the one Menatone and independent builders both highlight, and it adjusts pick attack and how easily the driven sound cuts through a mix².

The 2025 Blue Collar Mini adds a presence control to the mini format, which Menatone lists as new for that model year⁶⁷.

How the circuit works

The Blue Collar is a dual op-amp overdrive with 1N914 silicon clipping diodes². Silicon diodes clip at a higher threshold than germanium, which gives the drive a firmer edge. Builders on the Guitar FX Layouts blog, working from a verified stripboard layout of the early version published in June 2012, experimented with the circuit: one swapped the 1N914 diodes for 1N34 germanium to get a lower clipping threshold, and another tried a TL072 in the op-amp socket, which made no difference to the sound².

The current pedal keeps the original construction method. Menatone states that "this new Blue Collar is point to point wired like the original, but in a smaller enclosure and with jacks on top"¹. Point-to-point wiring means the components are soldered directly to one another rather than mounted on a printed circuit board, the same approach used in the smaller box version, which is "point to point wired just like the original 1997 version but with the jacks on top"⁴.

History and versions

The Blue Collar is the second pedal Menatone ever made. Menatone dates the design in two ways: the Mojo product page says the original "launched in late 1996" and "was designed specifically for single coil players"⁵⁶, while the Mini page says it "debuted in 1997 at a request for a Red Snapper with more gain and compression"⁶. The blog account agrees on 1997, quoting the launch as January of that year, "as the other side of the coin to the open sounding Red Snapper"².

The pedal has appeared in several forms over its life:

An older model with the exact same circuit also exists, and Menatone's product demos reference it¹. Both the standard pedal and the Mojo version carry audio demos of a Blue Collar solo by Gregg Montante¹⁸.

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