There is a sound that blues and classic-rock players have been chasing since roughly 1968, and almost nobody talks about it honestly. It is not a distortion sound. It is the sound of two amplifiers running at once — one glassy and clean, one cooking — with a Y-cable or an A/B/Y box splitting the guitar between them. Stevie Ray Vaughan built a career on it. So did half of Muscle Shoals. The clean amp keeps the pick attack, the string separation and the top-end sparkle; the dirty amp supplies the weight and the sustain underneath. Neither amp on its own sounds like the record. Together they sound three-dimensional, in a way that a single overdrive pedal into a single amp almost never does.
The problem is obvious: two amps means two amps. Two of everything to carry, two of everything to mic, two of everything to break down at the load-out. Which is why, in late 2008, when Jeorge Tripps was handed the keys to a resurrected Way Huge Electronics by Jim Dunlop, one of the very first things he built was a pedal that does the whole trick internally. He called it the Pork Loin Soft Clip Injection Overdrive, gave it a model number of WHE201, painted it purple, and — with a straight face — printed the phrase “the masses of pork power that exude from its space age circuitry” in the official product copy.
The joke name has cost this pedal a lot of respect over the years. Underneath it is one of the most quietly intelligent overdrive designs of the modern era, and one of the very few that is genuinely useful to guitarists and bassists. It is also, as of now, out of production — which changes the whole conversation about whether you should buy one. We will get to that.
Housekeeping: this one is discontinued, and that matters
Before anything else, a piece of admin that changes how you should read the rest of this article. The WHE201 Pork Loin is no longer in production. Dunlop’s own retail channel has carried it at $169.99, but the major retail listings now read “no longer available,” and the used market has responded exactly the way used markets respond to a discontinued cult item: as of September 2026, aggregated pricing puts the Pork Loin’s average at roughly $363, with live listings starting around $266.70 and the category placement bumped up into the “High-end / Boutique” tier. That is a pedal that shipped at a $170 street price in 2008 now asking more than double, second-hand.
We flag this at the top rather than burying it in the buying guide because it reframes everything. This is not a “should I add this to my board” article. It is a “is this specific, weird, discontinued design worth chasing on the used market when three modern pedals do something adjacent for less” article. We will answer that honestly at the end.
Where the Pork Loin came from: the 2008 Way Huge relaunch
Way Huge Electronics started life in 1992 as a genuine garage operation — Jeorge Tripps building high-quality effects for gigging players out of a small workshop, with the pedals gaining a reputation for closely matched component tolerances and a consistency that most boutique builders of the era could not match. Way Huge closed in 1999, right at the moment the boutique pedal explosion was about to happen. As Premier Guitar put it in their December 2008 write-up, some believe the company simply missed the boat on timing.
What followed was the standard scarcity spiral. Limited availability plus a genuinely distinct voice drove used prices “through the roof, with some selling for over a $1000 dollars.” Jim Dunlop, watching this happen, commissioned Tripps to bring the line back and give ordinary players a shot at the pedals.
The relaunch arrived as a three-pedal salvo, reviewed together by Jordan Wagner for Premier Guitar on 16 December 2008 (January 2009 issue). And here is the detail that gets lost: only one of the three was actually a reissue.
- Swollen Pickle Jumbo Fuzz MkII — the reissue, the one everybody was waiting for, and the one Wagner scored a flat 5.0. Street $160. We covered it in full in our Way Huge Swollen Pickle Jumbo Fuzz MkII feature.
- Fat Sandwich Harmonic Saturator — brand new. Rated 4.5. Street $180. Wagner called it “the sleeper in the new Way Huge line.”
- Pork Loin Soft Clip Injection — brand new. Rated 4.0. Street $170.
So the Pork Loin was not a resurrected 1990s legend riding on nostalgia. It was a fresh design, released into a market that was showing up for a fuzz pedal, and it got the lowest score of the three. Its reputation had to be built slowly, on stages, by players who found it and kept it. That is exactly what happened — and the roster that grew around it is a lot stranger and a lot more interesting than the review score suggests.
What “Soft Clip Injection” actually means
The name is not marketing noise; it is a fairly literal description of the circuit topology. The Pork Loin runs two parallel signal paths and blends them at the output:
- The overdrive path. A soft-clipped BiFET gain stage with a passive low-pass Tone control and a Curve function that lets you move the corner frequencies of the clipping.
- The clean path. Not a bypassed dry signal — an actual modified classic British preamp, with its own voicing and its own dedicated level control.
That second point is where the Pork Loin separates itself from the enormous field of “overdrive with a clean blend knob.” On most clean-blend pedals, the dry side is your untouched guitar signal, added back to fill in what the clipping stage squashed. On the Pork Loin, the clean side is a voiced preamp with its own EQ character and its own set of internal adjustments. Owners on the forums make this distinction constantly and correctly: the Pork Loin’s blend “is unique due to its own preamp section and dedicated controls, providing a different experience from traditional clean blends.” Some owners go further and describe the clean side as having Neve-console DNA in its behaviour — substantial headroom, especially when run at 18V, and a thickening quality rather than a transparency quality. If that appeals, our JHS Colour Box V2 feature covers the console-preamp-in-a-box idea from the other direction entirely.
You are, in other words, mixing a clean amp and a dirty amp. Inside one enclosure. On one footswitch. That is the SRV trick, and the pedal was designed to do it on purpose.
Full specifications
A genuine spec contradiction worth naming
Way Huge’s own marketing copy states that the Pork Loin has three internal mini controls: “Filter and Voice deliver extensive tonal shaping possibilities, while the overdrive Mix control allows the Pork Loin to be run as a clean preamp.” Retail spec sheets sourced from the same manufacturer material list four: Filter, Voice, Presence and Drive Mix, with Presence described as tweaking the high end of the overdrive path.
Both figures come out of first-party material. The four-control list is the one that matches what owners actually find inside the pedal and what the sibling Pork & Pickle manual documents (that pedal’s internal trimpot set includes a Presence control doing exactly that job). Our reading: the three-control line is condensed marketing copy that dropped Presence because Presence is the least dramatic of the four. Open the pedal and expect four trimpots. If yours has three, you have an early unit and we would like to hear about it.
This is the fifth time in six articles we have hit a power-or-control spec disagreement inside a single manufacturer’s own literature. It is not a Way Huge problem; it is an industry problem. Trust the manual over the web copy, and trust the pedal over both.
Every control, and what it actually does
Overdrive
Sets the intensity of the soft-clipped BiFET stage. The single most important thing to understand about the Pork Loin: it does not have much gain. Wagner flagged this in the original review as “a little disappointing at first,” before concluding that “it doesn’t really need a lot.” He is right, but it needs saying plainly. If you want a wall of saturation, this pedal will not give it to you at any setting. It is a low-to-medium-gain device by design.
Clean
Level control for the British preamp path. This is the knob that makes the pedal what it is. At zero you have a slightly dark, slightly polite overdrive. Open it up and the tone gains dimension, bite and definition without gaining gain — which is a genuinely unusual sensation the first time you hear it.
Tone
Passive low-pass on the overdrive path only. It cuts highs; it does not add them. Note that this control acts on the dirt, not the clean side, so a dark Tone setting with a healthy Clean level gives you a soft, round distortion sitting underneath a bright, articulate clean — which is precisely the two-amp texture.
Curve
A smaller knob that fine-tunes the corner frequencies of the overdrive’s clipping — effectively, where in the frequency spectrum the soft clipping starts to take hold. It is the difference between a drive that thickens the low mids and one that only bites the upper mids. Treat it as a set-and-forget voicing control rather than a performance control.
Volume
Output level. There is a lot of it — enough that pushing it hard into an already-warm amp is a legitimate use case, and one Wagner explicitly recommends: with the volume pushed, “the amp really started to cook, mixing the Pork Loin’s signal with the natural Marshall bite.”
The four internal trimpots
- Filter — adjusts the tonal spectrum of the clean British preamp.
- Voice — cuts midrange frequencies on the clean path.
- Presence — tweaks the high end of the overdrive path. Owners consistently report that opening Presence brightens the drive so it integrates properly with the clean side instead of sitting behind it.
- Drive Mix — the mix level of the overdrive path. Turn this all the way down and the Pork Loin becomes a pure clean British preamp with no overdrive at all.
That last point is the pedal’s best-kept secret and the reason it has a second life among players who never use it as a drive pedal. Multiple owners report running the internal trims to full clean and using the Pork Loin as a coloured clean boost / always-on preamp. If that is what you want, our JHS Clover Preamp feature covers a purpose-built modern take on the same idea.
The one legitimate criticism in the owner pool is that all of this requires a screwdriver and an open enclosure. The consensus con is exactly that: it “requires internal adjustments for optimal tone, possibly daunting for beginners.” Fair.
Famous players — and an unusually honest roster
Here is where the Pork Loin gets interesting, and where we have to be careful. Aggregator databases credit roughly 28 artists to this pedal, and unlike several recent entries in this series, most of those credits stand up to scrutiny, because a purple pedal with a comedy name is easy to identify in a photograph. What is striking is who is on the list.
Joe Bonamassa — the deepest Way Huge relationship on the list
Joe Bonamassa is credited via a Premier Guitar Rig Rundown in which Mike Hickey, Bonamassa’s guitar tech, discusses the Pork Loin by name at the 30:14 mark. A tech naming a pedal on camera is about as solid as this kind of evidence gets.
Bonamassa’s connection to Way Huge runs deeper than one pedal, and this is worth getting right because the internet frequently gets it wrong. Both of Way Huge’s flagship signature overdrives are Bonamassa collaborations, not John Mayer ones:
- Overrated Special — a limited run of 1,000 units designed for Bonamassa, reimagining the Green Rhino circuit with a more pronounced midrange and a dedicated 500 Hz boost/cut control.
- Doubleland Special (WHE212) — two Overrated Special circuits in one housing, with a Series mode for overdrive-into-overdrive, voiced on the Dumble Overdrive Special. Limited to 1,000 units worldwide, serial numbered and signed by Bonamassa, released as part of Way Huge’s 25th Anniversary. Bonamassa runs one side for humbuckers and one for single-coils.
We flag this explicitly because the Dumble connection makes people reach for Mayer’s name by reflex, and because we have been burned by recycled rosters before. The Green Rhino lineage those pedals came from is covered in our Way Huge Green Rhino MkV feature.
John Mayer — credited, and the credit is specific
Mayer’s Pork Loin credit comes from footage of him opening his pedal rig during the Born and Raised / Paradise Valley touring era, in which two Pork Loins are visible — alongside a Way Huge Swollen Pickle MkII. The pedal is also credited to the album Paradise Valley (2013).
Two of them. That is not a “somebody put it on the board” credit; that is a player who found a use for the pedal and then wanted a second one. Mayer’s rigs have changed enormously since 2013, and we make no claim about what is on his board today — but the 2013 credit is well-documented and specific.
Chris Wolstenholme (Muse) — and an album credit
Muse’s bassist has been photographed with a Pork Loin during the recording of The 2nd Law (2012), and the pedal carries an album credit for that record. Given that The 2nd Law is one of the most aggressively processed bass records of the 2010s, a pedal whose entire premise is “keep the clean signal intact while adding grind underneath” makes complete sense in that context.
Troy Van Leeuwen (Queens of the Stone Age)
Credited via a Premier Guitar Rig Rundown article. Van Leeuwen is one of the most consistently interesting pedal users in rock, and he also turns up on our Way Huge Aqua-Puss feature — he is a genuine Way Huge repeat customer, not a one-off endorsement. Van Leeuwen does not have his own entry in our guitarist archive; his bandmate Josh Homme does, and the QOTSA guitar-tone conversation is worth having in one place.
The bass contingent — and it is large
This is the part of the Pork Loin story that guitar magazines routinely undersell. An unusual proportion of the confirmed roster plays bass:
- Billy Sheehan — listed with a Pork Loin on Dunlop’s own artist page.
- Juan Alderete — likewise listed on Dunlop’s artist page. Alderete’s pedal knowledge is close to encyclopaedic, which makes his inclusion meaningful.
- Matt Freeman (Rancid) — uses the Pork Loin in his live bass rig for a gritty tone, documented in his own stage-rig walkthrough video.
- Jenny Lee Lindberg (Warpaint) — a Pork Loin is visible on her pedalboard, with the board’s ownership independently confirmed on video.
Four working bassists across metal-adjacent virtuoso rock, experimental prog, street punk and art rock is a broad church for one overdrive. Way Huge eventually formalised what those players had figured out: the Pork & Pickle Bass Overdrive & Fuzz (WM91) is the company’s first-ever dedicated bass pedal, and it is explicitly built around “the warm, soft-clipping tones of the Pork Loin Overdrive” combined with the Russian-Pickle fuzz, in a Smalls housing. The Pork Loin earned its own bass pedal by being adopted by bassists first.
The rest of the confirmed list
- Gem Archer (Oasis) — a Pork Loin appears on the pedalboard built for him by Daniel Steinhardt of That Pedal Show, dated 30 May 2017, sitting next to a Blues Driver. Archer does not have his own entry in our guitarist archive; his longtime bandleader Noel Gallagher does. The Blues Driver pairing is a genuinely good one and we unpack it below — see our Boss BD-2 Blues Driver feature.
- Wolfgang Van Halen — photographed with a Pork Loin in his live setup. Worth stating clearly for the search engines: this is Wolfgang, not Eddie. There is no evidence Eddie Van Halen ever touched one, and anyone telling you otherwise is guessing from a surname.
- Lars Frederiksen (Rancid) — his JCM 900 rig features a compact board including a Pork Loin and a Boss noise suppressor, per a photo shared by the band. That makes both of Rancid’s low-end-and-rhythm engine on the same pedal, which is a slightly remarkable thing for a purple overdrive with a butcher’s diagram on it. Frederiksen and Freeman are not in our guitarist archive; for the broader East Bay punk tone conversation see Billie Joe Armstrong.
- Jake Bugg — listed on Dunlop’s artist page as a user.
Who is not a Pork Loin player
Stevie Ray Vaughan died in 1990; the Pork Loin arrived in 2008. He appears in this article and in Premier Guitar‘s original review purely as the reference point for the technique the pedal emulates — clean amp and overdriven amp running together — not as a user. Same goes for Jerry Cantrell: Wagner’s review notes that boosting an already-overdriven JCM800 with the Pork Loin “pushed it into Alice in Chains territory,” which is a description of a sound, not a gear credit. We are naming both because they are the fastest way to explain what this pedal is for, and we are stating plainly that neither is a documented owner.
Tone recipes and settings
1. The SRV two-amp texture (the pedal’s home setting)
Overdrive 2 o’clock (roughly 70%), Clean 1 o’clock, Tone 11 o’clock, Curve noon, Volume to unity. Single-coils into a clean-ish amp. This is essentially Wagner’s own review setting — Telecaster into a JCM800, overdrive at about 70%, clean mixed to taste — and it is the fastest route to understanding what the pedal is doing. The tone gains “bite and muscle” without gaining aggression.
2. The subtle dirty boost (the owner-pool favourite)
Internal Drive Mix set to roughly 25%, so the blend sits at about 75% clean / 25% dirt. Overdrive 11 o’clock. Clean 2 o’clock. Volume just above unity. Reported by multiple owners as the sweet spot for an always-on tone-thickener. Nobody in the audience will identify a pedal; they will identify a better amp.
3. Pure British clean preamp — no drive at all
Internal Drive Mix all the way down. Clean maxed, Volume to taste, internal Filter and Voice set by ear. The overdrive path is now completely out of the picture and you have a voiced clean preamp on a footswitch. Superb in front of a modeller or an amp that sounds thin at low volume. This is the configuration that makes the Pork Loin worth owning even if you never want an overdrive sound out of it.
4. Cook the amp (the JCM800 setting)
Overdrive noon, Clean noon, Tone 1 o’clock, Volume 3 o’clock or higher. Amp already just breaking up. The Pork Loin now functions as a hot, EQ-shaped boost rather than a drive pedal, and the amp does the clipping. Wagner’s Les Paul-into-JCM800 result — “Alice in Chains territory” — comes from here.
5. Bright rhythm for a dark amp
Open internal Presence up so the drive path has real top end, then internal Voice to cut clean midrange. Overdrive 10 o’clock, Clean 3 o’clock, Tone 2 o’clock. This is the antidote to the most common complaint about the pedal — that it is dark. Owners consistently report the Pork Loin sounds excellent into a Vox AC30 (where dark is welcome) and can lack bite into Orange and Peavey amps (where it is not). Presence is your fix.
6. Bass grind that keeps the fundamental
Overdrive 1 o’clock, Clean 3 o’clock, Tone 10 o’clock, Curve 10 o’clock. The parallel clean path preserves the low fundamental while the drive path adds harmonic grind above it — the exact problem every bass overdrive has to solve. Owners describe the character as “gravelly, growly,” distinctly warmer and less clanky than the aggressive modern bass-drive standard. If the Pork Loin’s used price is out of reach, the Pork & Pickle Smalls (WM91) puts the same overdrive voice in a smaller box with a Russian-Pickle fuzz alongside it.
7. Stacked into a Tube Screamer
Pork Loin first, set for a clean-heavy blend (Overdrive 10 o’clock, Clean 2 o’clock, Volume 1 o’clock), into a TS808 or TS9 with Drive low and Level high. The Pork Loin supplies the body and the low-end the Screamer’s mid-hump removes, and the Screamer supplies the compression and the push. Sequence matters: Pork Loin first, always.
8. Solo lift without a volume jump
Second Pork Loin, or a footswitchable loop. Overdrive 3 o’clock, Clean noon, Volume matched to unity by ear. Because the pedal adds density rather than volume, it lifts a solo out of a mix without the “somebody stood on a boost” effect. This is very likely why John Mayer had two of them.
9. EQ change only
Overdrive fully down, Clean fully up, internal Filter and Voice tuned to the amp. One long-standing owner review describes the pedal as a “Swiss Army knife” precisely because it can function “for an eq change, boost (clean or slightly dirty), solo boost, low to med gain pedal.” If you only need the EQ half of that, a Boss GE-7 costs a fraction of a used Pork Loin and gives you sliders. Be honest with yourself about which you actually need.
Clock positions assume standard-taper pots. Start with all internal trims at factory centre unless a recipe says otherwise.
How it compares
Pork Loin vs. Vemuram Jan Ray
This is the single most common head-to-head in owner discussions, and the two pedals are less similar than the comparison implies. The Jan Ray is a transparent, mid-forward, distinctly bright low-gain drive with boutique pricing and boutique restraint. The Pork Loin is darker, denser, and does something structurally different with its parallel preamp. Owners note that the Pork Loin “excels at maintaining note definition due to its exceptional clean blend, even in low-gain settings,” and that it pairs beautifully with an AC30 but can go soft into brighter, harder-edged amps. Choose the Jan Ray if you want clarity and cut. Choose the Pork Loin if you want body and dimension.
Pork Loin vs. Analog Man King of Tone
Both are two-circuits-in-one-box, low-gain, amp-like designs with long waiting periods attached (one because of a waiting list, one because of the used market). The King of Tone runs its two sides in series as independently footswitchable drives. The Pork Loin runs its two paths in parallel and blends them on one switch. Different philosophies entirely: the King of Tone gives you two sounds; the Pork Loin gives you one sound that could not exist any other way.
Pork Loin vs. MXR Timmy
The Timmy circuit is the reference transparent overdrive: flat EQ, independent bass and treble cuts, high-end presence. Owners comparing the two describe the Timmy voicing as offering “a flat EQ with high-end boost, contrasting the Pork Loin’s darker tone.” That is the whole comparison in one line. The Timmy is also in production, costs less, and fits a smaller footprint. If “transparent” is what you want, buy the Timmy.
Pork Loin vs. JHS Morning Glory V4
The Morning Glory is the modern low-gain “always-on” default: open, slightly compressed, gets out of the way. The Pork Loin is emphatically not transparent — it imposes a British preamp voice on your clean signal. If you like your amp and want a drive that respects it, Morning Glory. If your clean tone is the problem, Pork Loin.
Pork Loin vs. Boss BD-2 Blues Driver
The pairing Gem Archer’s board actually runs. The BD-2 is bright, aggressive, spitty and dynamic; the Pork Loin is dark, dense and smooth. They are almost perfect complements, which is presumably why a professional board builder put both on the same board. BD-2 for cutting rhythm, Pork Loin for weight.
Pork Loin vs. Klon Centaur
An underrated comparison, because both are fundamentally blend pedals — the Klon‘s famous behaviour comes from mixing a clean path against a clipped one. The Klon’s clean path is essentially your dry signal treated to a buffer and a boost; the Pork Loin’s is a voiced preamp. The Klon is brighter and adds a top-end lift; the Pork Loin adds mid-body. And in the current market, a good used Pork Loin costs roughly one-fiftieth of a Klon.
Pork Loin vs. Fulltone OCD
Not really rivals. The OCD is an amp-like distortion with real gain on tap; the Pork Loin tops out well before the OCD gets started. If you have the OCD, the Pork Loin sits in front of it beautifully as a thickener. If you need one pedal for everything from clean boost to crunch, the OCD covers more ground.
Pork Loin vs. Boss SD-1 and the Screamer family
The SD-1 and the Tube Screamer lineage — surveyed in nine flavours in our JHS Bonsai feature — all work by scooping bass, humping mids and compressing. The Pork Loin works by adding a parallel clean path. They are opposite solutions to the same problem, which is why stacking them works so well and why owning both is not redundant.
Buying guide
The headline: this is a used-market purchase, and the used market is expensive. Average asking prices around $363 with entry listings near $266.70 mean you are paying a significant premium over the $170 street price this pedal shipped at. Decide whether you are buying a sound or a collectible, because the market is currently pricing it as both.
Versions and the John K mod
Early Pork Loins had a reputation for being too dark, and a widely circulated fix known as the John K mod — a single capacitor swap — addressed it, making the pedal noticeably brighter and letting owners back the Tone knob off maximum to roughly 2 o’clock rather than living with it pinned. The mod was once considered close to essential.
It is not any more. Later production units changed that capacitor value as stock, making the mod redundant. So when you see a listing advertising “with John K mod” at a premium, understand what you are looking at: a fix for an early unit, bringing it to the same place a later unit already sits. Not a rarity, not an upgrade over a late-model stock pedal. Pay accordingly.
What to check before you buy
- Open it, or ask for photos of the inside. You should see four trimpots. Ask whether they have been moved from factory positions, and ask the seller to photograph them so you can restore a baseline.
- Test the Clean knob through its full sweep. The clean preamp is the pedal’s whole value; a fault there is a dealbreaker.
- Test with the amp you actually own. The Pork Loin is amp-dependent to an unusual degree — reportedly excellent into an AC30, less convincing into Orange and Peavey voicings. Do not buy this pedal on a demo video.
- Check the footswitch. Owners rate the switches highly (“quality foot switches, indicating good overall build quality”), so a bad one usually means abuse rather than wear.
- Confirm it is a WHE201. The Pork Loin name appears on the Pork & Pickle Smalls (WM91) and on the rarer Pork Pie variant. They are not the same pedal.
Who should buy one
Buy it if: your clean tone is thin or flat and no amount of drive pedal fixes it; you want the two-amp texture without two amps; you play bass and want grind that keeps the fundamental; you want a footswitchable coloured preamp and like the idea of a hidden fifth pedal inside your fourth one.
Skip it if: you need gain; you want a transparent overdrive (buy the Timmy); you play into a bright, aggressive amp that already cuts; you are uncomfortable opening a pedal with a screwdriver; or the used price makes you flinch — because at $300 there are a lot of in-production pedals competing for that money.
Living with one
Power
Standard 9V DC, or a 9V battery via the internal compartment. Nothing exotic. Note that some owners report running the pedal at 18V for substantially increased clean headroom — a common trick with parallel-blend designs, and one that suits the Pork Loin’s preamp-first character. Do not do this without confirming your specific unit tolerates it; check with Dunlop before you experiment, because a discontinued pedal is not a pedal you want to cook.
Placement
Early. Owners “favour the Pork Loin as an always-on tone shaper, especially before dirtier pedals for maintaining low-gain clarity,” and that is the correct instinct. After a compressor such as the MXR Dyna Comp, before everything else with gain in it. Putting it after a RAT or a fuzz throws away the clean path’s entire purpose.
The trimpot ritual
Set the internals once, properly, with the amp and guitar you actually gig, and then leave them alone. Photograph the positions before you start so you can get back. The three-hour rabbit hole is real, and the pedal genuinely does sound different at both ends of every trim.
Board footprint
It is a full-size Way Huge enclosure — not small. If space is the constraint, the Pork & Pickle Smalls format is the answer, at the cost of the WHE201’s dedicated Curve knob (which becomes an internal trimpot on the Smalls).
Long-term outlook
Discontinued, US-made, all-analogue, no digital parts to become unobtainable. There is nothing in this circuit that ages badly. Barring physical abuse, a Pork Loin bought today should still be working in twenty years — which is part of what justifies the used premium, and part of why they are hard to find. People who own them do not sell them.
Frequently asked questions
Is the Way Huge Pork Loin still in production?
No. The WHE201 has been discontinued. It carried a $169.99 list price late in its run, but new stock is gone from the major retail channels and the pedal is now a used-market item, with average asking prices around $363 and entry listings near $266.70 as of September 2026.
What does “Soft Clip Injection” actually mean?
It describes the topology. The pedal runs a soft-clipped BiFET overdrive stage in parallel with a modified classic British clean preamp, then blends the two at the output. The clipped signal is “injected” into a clean path rather than replacing it — which is why the pedal keeps note definition even at low gain.
How much gain does it have?
Not much, and deliberately so. Premier Guitar‘s original review flagged the limited gain as its main shortcoming before concluding the pedal doesn’t need more. Treat it as a low-to-medium-gain device. If you want saturation, this is the wrong pedal and no setting will change that.
Can I use it as a clean preamp with no overdrive?
Yes — this is one of its best features. Turn the internal Drive Mix trimpot all the way down and the overdrive path drops out entirely, leaving the voiced British clean preamp with its own Filter and Voice adjustments. A significant number of owners use the pedal exclusively this way, as a coloured always-on boost.
Does it have three internal controls or four?
Four: Filter, Voice, Presence and Drive Mix. Some Way Huge marketing copy lists only three, omitting Presence, but retail spec sheets drawn from manufacturer material list all four, and the sibling Pork & Pickle manual documents a Presence trimpot doing the same job. Expect four when you open it.
What is the John K mod, and do I need it?
A single capacitor swap that brightens the pedal, developed because early Pork Loins ran dark enough that owners kept the Tone control pinned. Later production units adopted the changed capacitor value as stock, so the mod is redundant on later pedals. If a listing charges extra for it, you are paying to bring an early unit up to late-unit spec — not for an upgrade.
Does the Pork Loin work on bass?
Yes, and unusually well. Billy Sheehan, Juan Alderete, Matt Freeman and Jenny Lee Lindberg are all credited with one. The parallel clean path preserves the low fundamental that most overdrives destroy. Way Huge eventually made the point official by building its first-ever bass pedal, the Pork & Pickle (WM91), around the Pork Loin overdrive voice paired with the Russian-Pickle fuzz.
Is it true bypass?
Yes. True bypass, with a blue LED indicating the effect is on.
Did John Mayer really use two of them?
Footage of Mayer opening his pedal rig during the Born and Raised / Paradise Valley era shows two Pork Loins alongside a Way Huge Swollen Pickle MkII, and the pedal carries an album credit on Paradise Valley (2013). We make no claim about his current rig, which has changed substantially since. Note also that the two Way Huge signature overdrives frequently misattributed to Mayer — the Overrated Special and the Doubleland Special — were both designed for Joe Bonamassa.
What should I buy instead if I can’t find one?
For the same parallel-blend idea in a current pedal: the Pork & Pickle Smalls carries the same overdrive voice. For transparency instead of colour, the MXR Timmy. For a two-circuit low-gain box, the Analog Man King of Tone. For a voiced preamp on a footswitch, the JHS Colour Box or Clover. None of them do exactly what the Pork Loin does, which is rather the point.