JHS Morning Glory

The JHS Morning Glory is the pedal that built the JHS brand — Josh Scott's take on the Marshall Bluesbreaker overdrive circuit, refined through multiple revisions and now in its V4 form. It is widely considered one of the definitive transparent overdrives: a pedal that adds gain and break-up without significantly altering the underlying character of your guitar and amp. Where a Tube Screamer pushes mids and rolls off bass, the Morning Glory keeps your existing EQ profile largely intact and just adds drive on top.

The circuit traces back to the Marshall Bluesbreaker pedal of the early 1990s, itself an attempt to capture the tone of a cranked Marshall combo amp in stompbox form. JHS's adaptation refines the gain structure, voicing, and headroom while preserving the responsive, dynamic feel that made the original notable. The result is a pedal that does most of its work in the low-to-medium gain zone — light overdrive, blues break-up, edge-of-break-up tones — and that responds beautifully to picking dynamics and guitar volume control. Roll the volume back and the Morning Glory cleans up to a near-clean state with just a slight thickening of the signal; dig in and it opens up to a warm, slightly compressed crunch.

The control layout is simple: Volume sets output, Drive sets gain, and Tone shapes the high end. A side-mounted Bright-Cut switch tames the top end for brighter rigs (single-coil guitars into bright amps), and the V4 adds a Gain toggle that introduces additional low-end content and grit for fuller, more aggressive tones. The V4 also added a switchable boost circuit that can be activated remotely via the JHS Red Remote (sold separately), with a status LED that changes from blue to red when the boost is engaged. The V4 has roughly twice the headroom of earlier versions, making it cleaner at high output settings and better-suited to driving an already-overdriven amp.

Power requirements are standard 9V centre-negative, with a low 43mA current draw making it easy to fit on any pedalboard supply. The dimensions are 2.6" × 4.8" × 1.6" — a touch larger than nano-format pedals but still compact. Bypass is true bypass via mechanical relay. The pedal is hand-built in Kansas City, Missouri.

Who Is This For? The Morning Glory is the obvious choice for guitarists who want classic Marshall-style break-up in pedal form without the colouration that Tube Screamers add. It suits blues, indie, country, and classic rock players particularly well, and it works as either a primary low-gain drive or as a tonal foundation for stacking with other drives. Players who want to retain their amp's natural EQ character — rather than having a drive pedal impose its own — will find the Morning Glory's transparent voicing especially appealing. The strong used market across V1 through V4 versions makes it relatively easy to find clean examples, with V4 commanding a premium for its added boost circuit and improved headroom.