Boutique tones in the style of John Mayer and Joe Bonamassa for around 40 euros? NUX Steel Singer might be the hidden gem in the budget guitar pedal market.
Disclaimer: NUX provided the Steel Singer pedal for review. However, the company has no influence on the content of the video or post, and they do not preview it before publication.
What Is NUX Steel Singer?
This pedal goes for the sound of a mythical amp that rhymes with ‘fumble,’ more specifically, for the sound of one of that company’s amps. There’s really no need to dive deeper; all you need to know is that it’s a low-to-mid gain overdrive that you might forget is on until you take it out and miss it immediately. However, it does more than that.
You can use it to give your sterile clean sounds life and character, turn up the gain for raunchy blues sounds, or boost for leads while controlling the amount of high end with the filter control. It’s surprisingly versatile given its 3-knob control layout. You can do a lot with just Volume, Gain, and Filter knobs.
The pedal can be powered with a power supply or a 9v battery.
How Does It Sound?
The best way I can describe the Steel Singer is that it sounds ‘neutral.’ It’s great when adding some ‘hair’ to your clean sound. Running a Vola OZ into the pedal and from there to a REVV D20 set on clean, you can get all shades of ‘broken up’ clean tones that you can further shape with the filter control.
Filter Control
Speaking of the filter control, it works in a way where all the way to the right it’s not doing anything. When you start rolling it back, it begins cutting out some of the high end. It’s a powerful control that shines with single-coil guitars. Think anything from John Mayer to Joe Bonamassa; the secret to those types of sounds is less high end.
Volume and Gain
There’s a nice amount of volume boost or cut available with the volume control. As you can hear in the track in the video above, you can get great vintage-inspired rhythm guitar and lead tones as well.
Is NUX Steel Singer Good?
For a pedal that retails in the 40-50€ price range, the tones you get from it are great. It sounds ‘boutique’ and different from your typical tubescreamers and distortion pedals.
The filter control gives you a different kind of tone control that I personally enjoyed a lot. I could see a lot of people using this as their ‘always on’ pedal.
The pedal isn’t perfect, though: the one I had had wobbly knob hats, possibly knobs themselves as well. I’m not sure if it was just the knob hats or possibly pots being loose.
The housing of the pedal felt solid, as did the footswitch. The pedal introduced a bit of noise to my signal chain, more than my other drive pedals do. None of these issues were a dealbreaker, but it’s something you should be aware of.
Overall, I think the NUX Steel Singer is a great-sounding pedal with decent hardware. Even with its (minor) issues, I believe it’s a great deal.
If you’re interested in acquiring the pedal and support what I do, you can use the affiliate links below:
►►Reverb (NUX Steel Singer): https://reverb.partnerlinks.io/steel-singer
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