One Pedal, Four Personalities: The JHS Kilt V2 Is the Dirt Box That Does Everything

Some pedals pick a lane and stay in it. The JHS Kilt V2 rips out the entire road map. Press the footswitch and you have amp-like chimey breakup that barely feels like a pedal at all. Flip two small toggles and you are in full gated-fuzz territory that cuts through anything a PA system can throw at you. Everything between those extremes is available in the same enclosure, with the same three knobs, built around one of the most interesting drive circuits of the past thirty years.

The Kilt V2 began as a very specific request from a very specific guitarist, grew into a cult favourite among players who need a single dirt box to cover all their tonal ground, and has become one of the more technically distinctive entries in JHS Pedals’ Kansas City lineup. Its roots go back to a Japanese novelty pedal from the mid-1990s that Billy Gibbons and Joe Satriani somehow ended up playing. Its soul is the touring and studio demands of Stu G, founding guitarist of Delirious?. And its practical value on a modern pedalboard is considerable, especially when you factor in the Red Remote system that lets you switch gain modes mid-song with an external footswitch.

This is not a boutique one-trick pony. This is four pedals in one body, built to the demanding spec of a guitarist who has played arenas across three continents.

The Expandora Tradition: Where the Kilt Comes From

To understand the Kilt V2, you have to understand the Bixonic Expandora, which most guitarists have never heard of and which every guitarist who has played one tends to become slightly evangelical about. Bixonic introduced the Expandora in 1995 in Japan. Its enclosure looked like a hockey puck. Its circuit was unlike anything else on the market. And it wound up on the boards of players as varied as Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top, Joe Satriani, and Bootsy Collins, which tells you something about how genre-agnostic its sonic range was.

The Expandora’s architecture was genuinely unusual. Where most overdrive and distortion pedals use a single gain stage with some form of clipping, the Expandora ran two cascaded LM308 op-amp gain stages in series, similar in concept to putting two RAT distortion pedals end-to-end. But the real trick was a side-chain envelope detector that engaged an opto-FET as a gain-control element, meaning the circuit’s gain actually responded dynamically to the incoming signal strength. The result was a pedal that felt interactive in a way that most transistor and op-amp circuits do not, with a touch-sensitivity and dynamic range compression character more reminiscent of a pushed tube amplifier than a typical stompbox.

DIP switches on the original allowed for multiple voicing configurations, giving the Expandora a range from clean boost to wide-open fuzz. The pedal was eventually updated to the Expandora 2000R with improved bass response and external DIP switch access, but it remained a relatively niche product. When JHS Pedals co-developed the Kilt with Stu G, they took that Expandora architecture, selected a specifically chosen op-amp offering super low noise and an improved slew rate for a smoother character, redesigned the voicing system around three toggle switches rather than internal DIP switches, and turned the whole thing into a compact, road-ready pedal that preserves everything interesting about the original circuit while making it actually usable in a live context.

The name “Kilt” is a nod to Stu G’s Scottish heritage, a small piece of guitarist identity baked into a pedal that was otherwise built entirely around his practical requirements.

Stu G: The Guitarist Behind the Pedal

Stuart Garrard, known professionally as Stu G, is the founding guitarist, co-writer, and producer of Delirious?, the UK Christian rock band he co-founded in Littlehampton, West Sussex in 1992. Delirious? were not a niche act by any measure: during their active years through 2009, they toured arenas globally, released fifteen albums, and wrote songs including “Did You Feel the Mountains Tremble?”, “History Maker”, and “Majesty (Here I Am)” that have been covered and performed in churches and concert venues on every inhabited continent.

Stu G’s approach to live guitar was sophisticated by any standard. His live rig was built around a Pedaltrain PT-Pro board, at the heart of which sat a TheGigRig G2 switching system — the same signal-routing platform used by artists like Andy Timmons and numerous touring professionals who need total precision in signal management. He used Kemper Profiling Amp live, running profiles of his own AC30 and Marshall Bluesbreaker amplifiers, with Eventide effects for studio-quality processing in a live context. This is a guitarist who understood gear at a deep level and had the touring schedule to prove it.

When Stu G approached JHS Pedals, his request was admirably direct: a single dirt box that could cover everything he needed for both studio work and extensive touring, without compromise. He needed light, transparent drive for textural rhythm work. He needed mid-gain grit for rock dynamics. He needed heavy distortion for moments of full-band sonic aggression. And ideally, he needed to be able to get between those sounds without bending down and turning knobs mid-set. The Kilt V1 was the answer. The V2 refined it into a smaller, more efficient tool, adding the Red Remote system that solved the mid-set switching problem entirely.

Stu G has documented both versions of the pedal in his own YouTube video “The KILT — Stu G looks at V1 and V2,” walking through what changed between versions and why the V2 represented a meaningful upgrade for his specific workflow. This is not a superficial celebrity signature tie-in. The Kilt exists because one guitarist had a clearly articulated need and JHS built something to meet it.

Specifications

Four Gain Voices: Understanding the Toggle System

The Kilt V2’s toggle switches are the heart of what makes this pedal different from any straightforward overdrive. Most multi-mode drive pedals use a rotary selector — think the JHS Bonsai 9-Way Screamer or the JHS PackRat — which offers wide range at the cost of not being able to switch modes live without a dedicated footswitch or a very fast hand. The Kilt V2’s G1 and G2 toggles create four distinct gain voices through their four possible combinations, and the Red Remote system means one of those transitions can be footswitch-controlled in real time.

Here is how the four voices work:

When both G1 and G2 are down, you get the lightest gain setting: amp-like, chimey, touch-sensitive breakup. This is the Expandora at its most transparent, giving you the feel of a slightly-driven tube amp without a lot of added colour. It’s the setting for clean-to-dirty dynamics driven by pick attack and guitar volume rather than pedal saturation.

Flip G1 up while leaving G2 down, and you add a touch of drive that crosses into riffy grit territory. This is genuine rhythm-guitar overdrive, with enough saturation for power chords to have weight without losing the note definition that keeps single-note riffs clear in a full-band context.

Flip G2 up while leaving G1 down, and you are in near-distortion territory, with more saturation and sustained note decay that suits lead playing. The character here is more compressed, with the dual-cascade gain structure starting to push into the range where individual note harmonics start to bloom.

Both G1 and G2 up simultaneously sends the Kilt V2 into what JHS describes as “almost uncontrollable gated fuzz/distortion.” This is the maximum-gain setting, with hard clipping and a compressed, gated character that cuts through a dense mix with authority. It is not a subtle sound. It is a statement.

The CUT/FLAT toggle operates independently of the gain modes and addresses the low-end response of the circuit. In the FLAT position, the bass response is considerably beefier than the original Bixonic Expandora — generous enough for heavy rhythm playing and bass guitar applications. In the CUT position, the low end is trimmed to help the pedal sit more cleanly in a dense mix without muddying the low midrange. CUT is typically more useful in a band context where bass frequencies are already covered; FLAT is the choice for single-guitar situations or whenever you want maximum body in your tone.

The Red Remote system deserves a specific note for live players. The Red Remote input jack accepts a TRS footswitch cable connected to a compatible Red Remote adapter, which allows external footswitch control over the G2 toggle. This means you can use G1 down/G2 down as your base rhythm voice and remotely kick in G2 for a more saturated lead — effectively giving the Kilt V2 a switchable boost or gain-lift function controlled by a separate footswitch on your pedalboard, all without adding a second pedal to the chain. The Red Remote adapter is sold separately, but for guitarists who regularly switch between rhythm and lead gain levels, it turns the Kilt V2 into a two-channel dirt box in a single-switch compact enclosure.

Version History: V1 to V2

The original Kilt (V1) launched around 2015 and was a larger pedal in several respects. It featured a bigger enclosure, two dedicated footswitches, an independent boost section on the right side of the chassis with its own knobs, and four knobs plus four toggles. It was a comprehensive dirt platform, but its footprint was significant and its two-footswitch design required careful stage mapping.

The V2 took the same core Expandora-based circuit, shrank the enclosure to JHS’s standard compact size (2.6″ × 4.8″ × 1.6″), consolidated the controls to three knobs and three toggles, and replaced the second footswitch with the Red Remote system. The gain character at the core is unchanged; what changed is how practical the pedal is on a working pedalboard and how you interact with it live. The V2 is the version most players should be looking for on the used market, and it is the version currently in production.

Famous Players and the Expandora Sonic Tradition

The honest picture here is straightforward: the JHS Kilt V2 has one confirmed collaborating artist, and that artist is Stu G himself. He is the guitarist who commissioned the pedal, owns both versions, has documented his use of both publicly, and continues to use it in his current touring and studio work. He is not in the GuitarGangsters guitarist database, but his connection to this pedal is unambiguous and primary-sourced. It does not get more confirmed than “this pedal exists because of this guitarist.”

Beyond Stu G, the Kilt V2 has a relatively small Equipboard profile — two documented pro artists for the V2 specifically, which reflects both the pedal’s boutique positioning and the fact that many players who own and use it are not at the rig-rundown tier of visibility. The original Kilt V1 has broader Equipboard representation.

What the Kilt V2 does have is a genuine lineage connection to the Bixonic Expandora, whose confirmed users include some significant names. Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top was a documented Expandora user during his touring years, which is not entirely surprising given that the Expandora’s dynamic dual-cascade character has a lot in common with the pushed-amp-through-a-Dallas-Arbiter-Fuzz-Face sonic territory that Gibbons has always operated in. Joe Satriani’s use of the Expandora reflects the same virtues from a lead-guitar perspective: the dynamic interaction and note-by-note responsiveness of the opto-FET circuit suits technically demanding playing better than simpler hard-clipping designs.

These are Expandora connections, not Kilt V2 connections, and they should be understood as such. But they illuminate exactly what the Kilt V2 is reaching for sonically: not the flat-response clean-to-dirty of a standard op-amp overdrive, but the dynamic, signal-responsive character of a circuit that breathes with your playing. Gibbons and Satriani found that quality in the original; the Kilt V2 delivers a refined, more practical, and genuinely improved version of the same architecture.

Tone Recipes and Settings

All settings below assume the dials use a clock-face 1–10 scale (1 = fully counterclockwise, 10 = fully clockwise), with a Fender-style tube amplifier at clean to slight-breakup volumes unless noted.

How the Kilt V2 Compares

Within the JHS lineup, the Kilt V2 occupies a specific position that is worth mapping against its stablemates and a couple of market alternatives.

The JHS Angry Charlie V3 is the obvious first comparison, since both are JHS dirt boxes in the same price range. The Angry Charlie is a single-voice overdrive with a fixed character — Marshall JCM800-voiced British gain with a 3-band EQ. It is supremely good at that specific thing. The Kilt V2 covers more sonic ground but with a different character: where the Angry Charlie has the Marshall-calibrated midrange voicing, the Kilt V2 has the Expandora’s dual-cascade architecture, which feels more dynamic and interactive. If you know you want British gain specifically, the Angry Charlie wins that contest. If you need range, the Kilt V2 is the choice.

The JHS AT+ Andy Timmons is a two-channel drive pedal with a boost function and the Air control, at $219. Like the Kilt V2 with Red Remote, it offers mid-set channel switching. The AT+ is fixed to its specific British-gain voicing; the Kilt V2’s toggle architecture gives you genuine tonal variety rather than gain-level switching within one voice. These are complementary tools for different players.

Against the Boss BD-2 Blues Driver, the Kilt V2 is operating in a different price tier and with significantly more flexibility. The BD-2 is a single-voice asymmetrical overdrive that excels at blues and light rock work. At $79 it is a better entry point; at $199 the Kilt V2 is justified only if you need the range the toggle system provides.

Against the Ibanez TS9 Tube Screamer at $99, the comparison is similar: the TS9 does one thing — mid-focused, smooth tube-screamer overdrive — with exceptional consistency and a decades-long proven track record. The Kilt V2 does four things, none of which sound like a TS9. They are not competing for the same slot on a pedalboard; a Tube Screamer and a Kilt V2 make excellent companions, with the TS9 in front of the Kilt adding the classic TS low-gain stack into a higher-gain circuit for a layered, singing lead tone.

Buying Guide

At $199 new, the JHS Kilt V2 is priced firmly in boutique overdrive territory, sitting alongside the Angry Charlie V3 and the Morning Glory V4 in the JHS lineup. The Expandora-style circuit, hand-selected op-amp, and Red Remote system justify the price for players who need the full range of what the toggles offer.

If you are buying used, the V2 enclosure is compact (2.6″ × 4.8″ × 1.6″) and clearly labelled with three knobs (Volume, Gain, Tone) and three toggle switches. The V1, by contrast, is larger, has two footswitches, and has four knobs and four toggles. Make sure you know which version you are buying. Used Kilt V2 examples in excellent condition typically run $110–$150, which is genuinely good value for the sonic range on offer.

The Red Remote adapter, if you want the footswitch-controlled G2 switching, is sold separately by JHS. Factor that into your budget if the two-channel live functionality is important to your workflow.

Note that the Kilt V2 draws 64mA, which is modest by boutique pedal standards but slightly above the 40–50mA of simpler op-amp circuits. Any standard isolated power supply output rated at 100mA will handle it with room to spare. No battery operation is supported; a DC adapter is required.

Living With the Kilt V2

The Kilt V2 is a pedal that rewards experimentation with the toggle combinations more than it rewards any single preset-style dialing. Players who sit down and cycle through all four G1/G2 combinations systematically tend to discover that the pedal’s character is more context-dependent than a knob-based drive: the same Volume/Gain/Tone positions sound quite different depending on which gain mode is engaged, because the circuit’s fundamental compression character changes between modes rather than just the saturation level.

The CUT/FLAT toggle is important to set correctly before your session or gig rather than forgetting it exists. In a full-band live context, CUT is almost always the right choice for keeping the low-end clean. In a recording context where you want maximum body in a guitar part, FLAT gives you the beefier response that JHS specifically designed to exceed the original Expandora’s bass performance.

True bypass means the Kilt V2 has no effect on your tone when disengaged — no buffer added, no tone colouration when bypassed. For players with a buffered signal source upstream (like a Boss buffer or a Waza pedal), this is a non-issue. For players in a fully true-bypass chain running long cable runs, consider whether a buffer somewhere in the chain would serve the overall signal integrity.

The tactile toggle switches click firmly and stay in position reliably. Unlike the rotary switches on the Bonsai or PackRat, the G1 and G2 toggles can be flipped mid-song if you are comfortable navigating them by feel, and the Red Remote system means you can automate one of those transitions entirely. This is a practical, gigging-musician approach to multi-voice drive that the Kilt V2 executes well.

Frequently Asked Questions