Two Pedals for the Price of One: The Electro-Harmonix Hot Wax Dual Overdrive and the Art of Stacking From a Single Box

At some point, every serious pedalboard builder runs out of real estate before running out of ideas. You need a subtle hair, a roaring rhythm crunch, and something in between — but you’ve already got four pedals in the chain before the amp even shows up. Electro-Harmonix built the Hot Wax for exactly that moment. Released in 2017, it fuses two genuinely different EHX overdrive designs — the full-range Crayon and the vintage CMOS Hot Tubes — into a single enclosure with its own shared EQ section and a Blend knob that makes it as useful on bass as it is on guitar. This is not two versions of the same circuit squeezed together; it’s two fundamentally different overdrive topologies that can run independently, or be stacked in a fixed serial arrangement, with the Crayon driving the Hot Tubes. The result covers more sonic ground than most dual-drive pedals at any price point, even if the journey to the sweet spot requires a bit more patience than plugging in a single-stage drive and turning up the knob.

The Hot Wax sits in the EHX overdrive family alongside the Soul Food (Klon-inspired transparent overdrive) and the East River Drive (TS-808-voiced with JRC4558D and symmetrical clipping). Neither of those predecessors do what the Hot Wax does. The Soul Food is a one-trick pony — a magnificent trick, but singular. The East River Drive has a fixed mid-hump and fixed character. The Hot Wax brings two distinct voices with different clipping architectures, unified under a two-band EQ and a blend control that no single-circuit overdrive pedal can match. If you need range, this is where range lives in the EHX overdrive catalog.

Origin Story: Two Classic EHX Circuits Find a Common Home

The Hot Wax’s DNA reaches back to two separate EHX designs with distinct histories. The Hot Tubes circuit has roots in the late 1970s, when EHX built the original Hot Tubes overdrive — one of the earliest guitar pedals to use CMOS (Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor) logic chips for gain rather than conventional silicon transistors or bipolar op-amps. Where most overdrive circuits use diodes to clip the signal, CMOS-based designs use the internal logic gate switching thresholds of the chip itself to produce clipping. The character is different: less sharp than hard diode clipping, more compressed than transistor saturation, with a particular “pushed amp” quality that guitar players in the late 1970s found hard to define but easy to enjoy. The original Hot Tubes pedal was a cult item — not widely known, not heavily endorsed, but beloved by a specific subset of players who wanted something that didn’t sound quite like anything else.

The Crayon is a more modern creation. EHX designed it as a full-range overdrive — deliberately flat in frequency response where Tube Screamer-style circuits have a pronounced mid-hump centered around 500-800Hz. The Crayon doesn’t boost mids and doesn’t roll off bass. What you put in, you get out, with added gain and harmonic content rather than with a frequency reshaping applied on top. That philosophy makes it more versatile across guitar types and more useful as a bass guitar overdrive, but it also means it doesn’t have the same automatic “cut” in a band mix that a mid-focused circuit provides by default. The Crayon handles that question with its shared EQ section rather than with circuit topology.

EHX announced the Hot Wax on August 21, 2017, via a Premier Guitar press release, positioning it as “the next evolution in inspired overdrives.” The original USA street price was $111.70. By 2026, the MSRP sits at $126.80, with street pricing typically landing between $100 and $120 new. The pedal was reviewed in Sound On Sound and MusicRadar in February 2018, and in December 2018, Bjorn Riis of gilmourish.com produced a demo video — featured on EHX’s own blog — showing that the Hot Wax can be dialed into convincing David Gilmour-style overdrive tones. The pedal has lived quietly in the EHX catalog since then, consistently available and consistently underrated relative to the tonal range it offers.

Specifications

The Two Circuits: What They Actually Do

Hot Tubes: The CMOS FET Voice

The Hot Tubes section occupies the left side of the pedal (red LED, left footswitch) and uses a CMOS FET gain stage — meaning the clipping is produced not by diodes but by the logic-gate switching behavior of the CMOS chip itself. In practical terms, this produces a clipping character that Paul White of Sound On Sound described as going “from almost perfectly clean to a slightly hairy blues tone,” while also doubling as “a cleanish boost to push the front end of an amp.” That range — clean boost to subtle hair — is the Hot Tubes’ home territory. You won’t find crushing gain here on its own. What you will find is a quality of push that sounds more like a valve amp starting to work hard than like a conventional overdrive pedal adding gain to the chain. The CMOS FET clipping compresses the signal in a particular way that the circuit’s original 1970s users found resembled the feel of an amp on the edge of breakup more than anything else available in pedal form at the time.

MusicRadar called the Hot Tubes “a somewhat temperamental drive compared with the open and intuitive saturation of the Crayon.” This is worth understanding in context: temperamental here means reactive. The Hot Tubes section responds significantly to guitar volume and pickup output. Back the guitar’s volume pot off and the Hot Tubes becomes a cleaner boost; push a hot humbucker at full volume into it and the clipping character shifts noticeably. For players who use guitar volume as a live tone control — rolling back for clean, pushing up for grit — this reactivity is exactly what they want. For players who set everything and forget it, the Hot Tubes requires a bit more calibration up front.

Crayon: The Full-Range Voice

The Crayon section (green LED, right footswitch) is the easier of the two to dial in quickly, which is why MusicRadar noted that “most of the fun of this pedal lives on the Crayon side.” The full-range overdrive character means it processes the full frequency spectrum without the mid-emphasis of a Tube Screamer or the bass rolloff of many vintage overdrive designs. A TS-style circuit like the Ibanez TS9 cuts bass going into the clipping stage and boosts mids on the way out — a frequency shaping that helps the guitar cut through a band mix but also gives that characteristic nasal quality at high gain. The Crayon doesn’t do that. Bass goes in, bass comes out. Highs go in, highs come out. What changes is the gain level and the harmonic content added by the clipping stage.

This full-range approach means the Crayon is genuinely useful for bass guitar — not as an afterthought but as a serious application. The EHX Blend control (shared across both sections) makes it even more bass-friendly: with BLEND set to mix dry signal in alongside the Crayon’s output, the low end stays intact under the overdrive, a technique bassists use specifically to preserve fundamental while adding upper-harmonic texture. On bass, the Hot Wax is a more complete tool than almost any single-stage overdrive at this price.

Stacking the Two: Fixed Serial Chain

When both sections are engaged simultaneously, the routing is fixed: the Crayon feeds into the Hot Tubes. The Crayon acts as a preamp stage, and the Hot Tubes acts as the final output stage. The Crayon VOL knob’s function changes in this configuration — instead of controlling master output, it controls the gain level between the two stages. Push the Crayon VOL up and you’re driving the Hot Tubes harder, increasing saturation and bringing out more of the CMOS clipping character. The Hot Tubes VOL then sets the final output level. This is an important distinction: in stacked mode, you have direct control over the inter-stage gain relationship, which is essentially what the Drive knob on many boutique “preamp + output stage” designs adjusts but rarely with this level of independence.

The shared EQ section (BASS and TREBLE) is active whenever either or both overdrive sections are engaged. When neither section is on, the EQ bypasses along with the overdrive. The BLEND control remains active with either section engaged; crucially, when BLEND mixes in dry signal, the tone controls affect only the wet (overdriven) portion — the dry signal passes through without EQ coloration. This is the most technically elegant aspect of the Hot Wax design: you can add a little overdrive, cut the top end of the driven signal to soften harshness, and still hear your full-range dry guitar underneath without the EQ thinning out your clean tone.

Famous Players

The Hot Wax has no confirmed famous players in the sense that no major touring guitarist has documented the EHX Hot Wax on a Premier Guitar Rig Rundown, in a Guitar World interview, or on an EHX manufacturer artist page. The spreadsheet brief accurately notes “Saknar säker artistkoppling” — the pedal’s story is about its sonic character and pedalboard utility, not about celebrity association.

The closest thing to a famous-player connection is the December 2018 EHX blog post featuring Bjorn Riis of gilmourish.com demonstrating the Hot Wax’s ability to achieve David Gilmour-style overdrive tones. EHX featured the video and quoted Gilmourish on the product page itself: “You can easily use the Hot Wax for anything from clean boost to heavy distortion.” This connection is worth noting with precision: Riis demonstrated that the tones are achievable with the Hot Wax; Gilmour himself does not use the pedal. What the demo proves is that the Hot Wax’s low-gain, touch-sensitive CMOS Hot Tubes circuit and full-range Crayon character can produce credible results in that style — which is meaningful information about the pedal’s range even if it stops well short of a direct artist endorsement.

The Hot Wax is the kind of tool that working musicians carry on actual gigging pedalboards without photographing or cataloging it for YouTube thumbnails. Equipboard lists dozens of working professionals using it. It does the job of multiple pedals in one footprint, it costs less than most boutique single-circuit drives, and it includes an adapter. The players who gravitate toward it tend to be pragmatic rather than brand-conscious — which says more about the pedal’s practical utility than any number of famous names would.

Tone Recipes and Settings

Signal Chain Placement and Comparisons

Where It Belongs in the Chain

The Hot Wax uses buffered bypass, which keeps the circuit’s buffer active even when both overdrive sections are disengaged. This is worth knowing for two reasons. First, it’s a genuine advantage when the pedal heads up a long chain or a long cable run — the buffer maintains signal integrity before it reaches anything else on the board. Second, if you’re planning to run a germanium fuzz pedal before the Hot Wax in the signal chain, the buffer can interact with germanium fuzzes (which are impedance-sensitive) in ways that alter the fuzz’s character. The conventional solution is to place impedance-sensitive fuzzes before any buffered pedal, which means before the Hot Wax. In practice, for most players running silicon circuits throughout, the buffered bypass is a straightforward advantage.

The 75mA current draw is notably higher than single-stage overdrive pedals — compare it to the 6mA draw of the East River Drive or the 3mA draw of most Big Muff variants. On a fully loaded pedalboard with a 1A supply, 75mA for a single pedal is manageable but worth accounting for. Most dedicated pedalboard power supplies list individual output capacities; verify that the output you assign to the Hot Wax can handle 75mA under load. On a power supply with 250-300mA isolated outputs, the Hot Wax takes about a quarter of the available current for that output.

Hot Wax vs. EHX Soul Food

The Soul Food is a Klon-inspired JFET transparent overdrive with a more refined, “premium” quality in its overdrive character — slightly hard-clipping, with a particular breakup behavior that many players describe as the most musical clean-to-dirty transition in its price range. The Soul Food is a single circuit with a fixed character and a narrower range. The Hot Wax has a wider range but a less “refined” individual character in either of its sections. If you need one thing done very well, the Soul Food; if you need a range of things done capably, the Hot Wax.

Hot Wax vs. EHX East River Drive

The East River Drive is an Analog Man-designed TS-808 clone with a JRC4558D op-amp and symmetrical clipping — warm, mid-focused, with the classic Tube Screamer mid-hump built into the circuit. The Crayon section of the Hot Wax is explicitly the opposite of this: full-range, no mid-hump, equal treatment of all frequencies. For players who want the TS character, the East River Drive is the better tool. For players who find TS-style circuits too nasal or mid-heavy, the Crayon is the better tool. For players who want both (and the gain of the Hot Tubes on top), the Hot Wax is the only option in this price range.

Hot Wax vs. Ibanez TS9

The Ibanez TS9 is the canonical mid-focused overdrive, using the JRC4558D in asymmetrical clipping mode with the Tube Screamer’s characteristic bass rolloff and 500-800Hz mid-boost. It’s a single circuit, one sound, done at the highest level. The TS9 is the pedal to buy if you want the TS tone and only the TS tone. The Hot Wax is the pedal to buy if you want a wider range — including a full-range overdrive (Crayon) that explicitly avoids the TS tonal signature, plus a CMOS push stage (Hot Tubes) that adds something neither pedal does independently.

Hot Wax vs. Boss BD-2 Blues Driver

The Boss BD-2 is a single-circuit asymmetrical overdrive with a bright, glassy character that cleans up well with guitar volume. Like the Crayon, it has a relatively wide frequency response compared to TS-style circuits. Unlike the Hot Wax, it’s one voice, one footswitch, no stacking, no blend control. The BD-2 is the simpler, lighter, smaller option for players who need exactly one overdrive sound. The Hot Wax is for players who need at least two.

Buying Guide

The Hot Wax is the right choice when you genuinely need two different overdrive characters in one enclosure — specifically the low-gain, CMOS-flavored Hot Tubes push and the higher-gain, full-range Crayon. It is not the right choice if you want the best possible version of one specific circuit; in that case, buy the individual EHX pedal (standalone Crayon or standalone Hot Tubes reissue) or a competing single-circuit design that excels at exactly what you need. The Hot Wax’s value is in range and compression of pedalboard real estate, not in being the definitive expression of any single overdrive character.

New, the Hot Wax comes in at $100-120 street in 2026, with an adapter included — a meaningful advantage over EHX nano-enclosure pedals that require a separate adapter purchase. Used examples in excellent condition trade between $60 and $85, which represents reasonable value for a dual-circuit pedal with this feature set. There are no known significant circuit revisions or variant versions to navigate when buying used; the pedal has been consistent in production since 2017.

For guitarists: the Hot Wax’s strongest application is as a pedalboard space consolidation tool — replacing a boost pedal and a rhythm overdrive with a single enclosure that handles both roles independently and stacks them when needed. For bass players: the Blend control and full-range Crayon circuit make this genuinely useful in a way that most guitar-focused overdrives are not. The bass application is not marketing language; the circuit architecture specifically supports it.

Living With the Hot Wax

The Hot Wax rewards methodical dialing-in more than immediate plug-and-play results. The Hot Tubes section’s temperamental quality noted by MusicRadar is real: it responds to input levels, pickup types, and guitar volume in ways that require a few minutes of exploration to understand. Players who approach it as two independent pedals sharing a housing — setting each section’s VOL and DRIVE for the specific role it will play — get significantly better results than those who treat it as a single two-knob overdrive and expect it to do everything automatically.

The buffered bypass is active at all times, even with both sections off. For most signal chains this is transparent and beneficial. If you notice any subtle interaction with impedance-sensitive pedals (germanium fuzzes, vintage wah circuits) placed before the Hot Wax in the chain, try reordering those pedals to a position after the Hot Wax or compensate with a true bypass buffer before the affected pedals. This is not a flaw — it’s the practical reality of buffered bypass in mixed chains.

The shared EQ is a feature that takes some time to understand fully. Both sections share the same Bass and Treble controls, which means you can’t EQ the Hot Tubes and Crayon sections differently when both are engaged. In practice, this is rarely a limitation: the DRIVE and VOL controls of each section provide enough gain-staging independence that the shared EQ serves as a final tonal adjustment rather than a section-specific voice shaper. The Blend control, which adds dry signal that bypasses the EQ entirely, adds another dimension of tonal management that makes the shared EQ less limiting in practice than it might seem on paper.

FAQ