Vox V810 Valve-Tone

The Vox V810 Valve-Tone is a discontinued overdrive pedal, made in China or Taiwan for Vox and dropped from the line in about 2000. Analog Man, whose mod shop has worked with the circuit, describes it as "a great sounding pedal with true bypass"¹. It belongs to the same family as other overdrive pedals built around the Tube Screamer formula, and it sits apart from Vox's later in-house drives such as the Vox Big Ben Overdrive and the Vox Ice 9 Overdrive.

What it does

The V810 is, at heart, a Tube Screamer. The technical site Guitar FX Layouts, after tracing the schematic for a DIY layout, summed it up in three words: "Yup. Vox made TS."² That means the familiar mid-forward, compressed overdrive voicing that pedal players know from the TS-808 and TS-9, and it is why the pedal caught the attention of modders: the same modifications that work on a Tube Screamer apply here.

Analog Man, who offer a Silver mod for the Tube Screamer family, extended the same treatment to the V810. Their page says the mod is offered "for the same price as our silver option on a TS9" and that "it will sound just like our TS9/808/Silver" but with true bypass retained¹.

The circuit, for the technically minded

Guitar FX Layouts published a verified stripboard layout of the circuit in July 2014, and a reader built it and confirmed it working in May 2017². A few details from that analysis set the V810 apart from a stock Tube Screamer:

• The input and output buffers use 2SC2389 transistors in the original units; 2N5088 or 2N5089 parts work as substitutes².
• The published layout omits the original's power supply section and its transistor-based LED switching, which the author called overly complex².
• The author's schematic showed a 1K output pulldown resistor, which he considered far too small, so the layout uses 100K instead².
• The 100µ output capacitor found in the layout could also serve in most Vox pedals, whose output caps he described as "ridiculous 100µ"².

What players and reviewers said

The verdicts on record are positive but measured. Guitar FX Layouts' author, who built the circuit himself, reported: "Anyway, it sounds good though, a nice talking clone. Sounds like it has lower gain but I haven't tested it out on a real [amp]"². He also recalled owning the original pedal and called it great².

Analog Man's page carries endorsements of the V810 from players including Scott Henderson, Greg Martin and Daniel Zimmerman¹. Between the maker-side praise and the tech community's view of it as a Tube Screamer with apparently lower gain, the V810 has a reputation as a quieter-mannered take on the most cloned overdrive circuit in pedals. Players comparing it against the TS-9 directly can see the two side by side in the Boss SD-1 vs Ibanez TS9 Tube Screamer comparison.

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