Mosky Golden Horse

The Mosky Golden Horse is a mini overdrive pedal from Mosky, built around the circuit of the Klon Centaur. Mosky's own product page calls it a "Mini Klon Centaur Effect Pedal" and lists it as based on the Klon Centaur¹. It packs that circuit into a small enclosure measuring 115 x 61 x 60 mm, with three controls and a list price of $48 as of June 2026²³.

The Klon Centaur it copies is a light-to-medium gain overdrive that uses hard clipping, and it is most commonly used as a clean boost or an "always on" pedal rather than as a heavy distortion⁴. The Golden Horse aims at that same job: a low-gain overdrive or boost that sits in front of your amp and pushes it, rather than replacing the amp's own character.

Controls and how it works

The Golden Horse keeps the Klon's three-knob layout²:

Like the Klon, the pedal uses hard clipping: the signal's peaks are clipped against a fixed ceiling, which adds harmonics and sustain. The clipping elements are the part players care about most in any Klon-style pedal, and both Golden Horses use germanium diodes for this job⁴²⁵.

The diodes and the circuit

Guitar World's Klon-clone buying guide notes that the otherwise all-SMD (surface-mount) Golden Horse "should boast two through-hole germanium diodes"². Germanium diodes clip at a lower voltage than silicon, which is part of why Klon-style pedals are described the way they are: the clipping starts earlier and is often called softer or rounder than a silicon-diode design. The rest of the Mosky's components are surface-mount, which is how the circuit fits in a box this small and sells at this price.

How it compares to a real Klon Centaur

The Klon Centaur was built by Bill Finnegan and became one of the most sought-after overdrives ever made. The Mosky Golden Horse takes its cue from that circuit in a much smaller and cheaper package: it measures 115 x 61 x 60 mm² and carries a list price of $48³, against the original's reputation as a collector piece. Its three controls, Gain, treble and output⁶, mirror the layout players associate with the Centaur's approach to gain staging.

The Golden Horse takes that circuit and puts it in a plain mini enclosure at $48³. On how it sounds, Delicious Audio's Paolo De Gregorio wrote that it "recreates the tone of a Klon with slightly more spiky, less smooth and warm results"³. That is the honest summary of any budget Klon copy: close in character, not identical in feel.

Guitar World's guide also lists the bypass as a change from the original: the Golden Horse is true bypass, where the Klon Centaur is not².

A note on names: Mosky and Decibelics

There is a second, unrelated pedal called the Golden Horse, from the Spanish builder Decibelics. The Decibelics Golden Horse is a hand-built Klon clone that, in Delicious Audio's description, "sports almost the exact same components and values as a Klon Centaur #2505 from 2001", with TL072 opamps, N.O.S. 1N34A germanium diodes and a charge pump that raises the internal voltage from 9V to 18V for more headroom⁷. It does not accept batteries either, though its double-channel Golden Royale variant adds a battery slot⁷. The Mosky Golden Horse covered on this page is the budget mini pedal, not the Decibelics build.

Where it sits among Mosky's overdrives

Mosky makes a range of small overdrives alongside this one, including the MOSKY Green Drive Overdrive, the Mosky Hand-Wired Ultimate Drive, the Mosky Mini Screamer Overdrive and the MOSKY MM Silver Overdrive. The Golden Horse is the Klon-style entry in that lineup, where the Mini Screamer follows the Tube Screamer and the Ultimate Drive follows the OCD¹³.

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