By 
Tone City Durple Pedal Review – Danish Pete on a BUDGET!
Introduction
I have reviewed the amazing Thorpy Dane(Full Review). A collaboration with the “just as amazing” Danish Pete. However, that pedal isn’t cheap! Luckily, Pete has teamed up with the Tone City guys to bring you the Tone City Durple! A tiny purple overdrive pedal that is inspired by Danish Pete’s sounds! However, is it any good? Is it just a relabelled pedal or is it a mini and affordable version of “The Dane” by Thorpy? Why don’t we find out!
As with all our reviews, I will go through the Tone City Durple itself, the controls, the features, show you some sounds and then finish off with my thoughts! What do we honestly think about this pedal? The Tone City Durple has a very big selling point which I think will let you ignore all the little downsides! So, let us run through what the Tone City Durple is!
The Tone City Durple Pedal
What controls does the Tone City Durple have? It is a pretty standard laid-out overdrive pedal. So let us take a look at the controls and options you have on the Tone City Durple:
- Mid: This knob allows you to cut or boost the Mid-range to your liking.
- Volume: Adjusts the overall output the Durple.
- Tone: Shape the tone to allow more bass or more treble.
- Gain: How much clipping and saturation you get out off the pedal.
The Tone City Durple isn’t a high-output pedal. It is designed to be a low-gain overdrive! Used in conjunction with other pedals for gain stacking and allowing more options! If you are familiar with Danish Pete’s playing, he is a huge fan of stacking overdrives and using various low-gain pedals to achieve his desired gain level.
What controls does the Tone City Durple have? It is a pretty standard laid-out overdrive pedal. So let us take a look at the controls and options you have on the Tone City Durple:
- Mid: This knob allows you to cut or boost the Mid-range to your liking.
- Volume: Adjusts the overall output the Durple.
- Tone: Shape the tone to allow more bass or more treble.
- Gain: How much clipping and saturation you get out off the pedal.
The Tone City Durple isn’t a high-output pedal. It is designed to be a low-gain overdrive! Used in conjunction with other pedals for gain stacking and allowing more options! If you are familiar with Danish Pete’s playing, he is a huge fan of stacking overdrives and using various low-gain pedals to achieve his desired gain level.
More on the Tone City Durple
The Durple is side-loaded with the input and power (right-hand side) and output (left-hand side). These pedals (as with most of the Tone City line-up) will not run on a battery! This is due to the size, as there is no room to put a battery inside. To save even more space, they have put the power LED inside the gain control! The knob will glow when the pedal is engaged.
You can purchase the Tone City Durple online for around £45. If you would like to check out more information or grab one for yourself, then you can use our affiliate links below.
The Sounds
The demo songs are just the Tone City Durple going straight into the Nano Cortex! For both demo songs, it is just straight into the front end of the Nano Cortex with a bit of delay added in post-production! Nothing overly complicated going on! Simple rig for a simple pedal!
After the demo songs, I take you through the sounds you can expect to get from the Tone City Durple. I show you how it sounds into a clean and overdriven amp. For the sound samples, I am running the Durple into my Nano Cortex (Review Here) with a capture of my RD Amp. I have added a bit of reverb from the Nano Cortex.
What are my thoughts?
The Design
Design-wise, I absolutely love this pedal! The graphics and colours are just lovely! The nice purple sparkly in the paint job highlighted with the white decals! I even love the little logo in the middle, which is a nod to Prince! For such an affordable pedal, it is super well designed, and the finish and quality are better than you would think for a pedal of this price point!
If you have read any of my other reviews, then you will know I tend to focus on the controls snd knob feel. For such an affordable pedal, the Tone City Durple knob’s feels incredible. I would argue they are more on the side of stiff, but you certainly feel safe knowing they aren’t going to move or go anywhere!
Inside the box, you will find the Tone City Durple, an information card, sticky felt, and some Velcro! Both the felt and Velcro are cut to the exact size! The box itself isn’t anything special; it gets the job done and keeps the pedal safe while in transit! However, I wouldn’t say it is a box you want to keep!
"After a low-gain overdrive? This is all you need!"
The Sounds
After a low-gain overdrive? This is all you need! This isn’t just good for the money; this is good, full stop! Setting up my amp to a very light overdrive sound, then pumping this into the front end just opened it up!
Thanks to the mid control, you have so much control over your sound! Depending on the amp, the guitar, and even the room you are in, you can adjust your mids so you will always be heard! Combine this with the overall tone control, and you have a good amount of sculpting power in the Tone City Durple!
The tone control is so usable! Even cranking it right up, you still get a very usable sound! On both extremes, it has a sound that someone will want to use. I would say that it doesn’t have a huge range on the tone pot, but the range that it does have is fully usable.
More on the Sounds
Don’t be fooled, although this is marketed as a light to medium overdrive, when I combined the volume and drive I found you could get some very good “high” gain sounds. I think you would be best pairing this with another overdrive and you will find yourself having a lot of drive sounds on tap!
I plugged the Tone City Durple into a fully digital amp and I must say it worked just as well! The mid and tone worked and adjusted the sound as I would have wanted! I would be happy to use this pedal with a digital amplifier! It is a pedal you would expect to get great tones with any amp!
The Drawbacks
My only critique with the Tone City Durple is the knobs! The miniature knobs you find on all these tiny pedals work fine, but the three black knobs are so hard to see where they are set! If you plan to set and forget then this won’t matter, but if you want to make some adjustments it’s fairly tricky to see where you are! It would have been better if they put a little white dot, just so you know where you are on the controls!
Not really a critique but worth noting that not many guitar shops stock Tone City! I am seeing more and more start to but currently only a handful of shops will stock Tone City pedals in general let alone the Durple. So unless you grab one from the shops below, then you might struggle to get one! However, they do crop up on eBay and Facebook Marketplace once in a while. So keep your eyes open! Hopefully a few more people start to stock Tone City as they do make some incredible pedals.
"I think for the price you can’t go wrong with the Tone City Durple!"
Final Thoughts
Honestly, this is an incredible pedal! That’s it! If you want a light to medium overdrive pedal then the Durple should be on your list! Ignoring the price completely, it is a great pedal! However, when you factor in that it is sub £50 then it becomes an even better deal! I would say that most people would enjoy this pedal! It is hard to recommend that everyone should buy a pedal but at this price, it is worth a go.
I think for the price you can’t go wrong with the Tone City Durple! A wonderful pedal in a compact size that would be suited to most people’s boards! Doesn’t matter if you are looking for a pedal to push your amp a bit, give you tone a bit of a sparkle or get some lovely overdrive, the Tone City Durple can do a lot of things really well!
A quick note!
If you are after a fully built and custom made pedal for Danish Pete then you will want to check out the Thorpy FX “The Dane”. I reviewed this pedal a while ago and it is definitely a pedal that is worth checking out! You can find the full review here!
Conclusion
Thank you for checking out my review of the Tone City Durple! This has been a really fun review and I have really enjoyed checking out this pedal! I always love checking out affordable and budget-friendly pedals! I think Tone City and Danish Pete have absolutely smashed it with this pedal! A great way for fans of Pete and Andertons to support them on a budget!
If you want to check the Durple out and purchase one for yourself, you can pick one up for yourselves at the links below. They are affiliate links, so if you do purchase something we get a small commission at no extra cost to you! Also, if you purchase from Andertons and add two or more pedals to your cart you will get a free power supply! (This is correct at the time of writing)
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Tone City Durple Links:
- Tone City Durple (Thomann Affiliate)
- Tone City Durple (Andertons Affiliate)
- Andertons Affiliate Link
- Thomann Affiliate Link
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