
Grab yourself a Tone City Golden Plexi:
Golden Plexi 3 at Tone City:
The Golden Plexi has become something of a legend in the guitar world: when the original first came out, over 10 years ago now, Rob Chapman and Captain Lee Anderton helped push this unassuming pedal to the masses with some incredible videos on the Andertons YouTube channel.
The Golden Plexi did make it easy: plug it in, switch it on, and your amp becomes a snarling Marshall stack turned up to 11! And it cost less than $50 back in the day too.
Then, in 2022, Tone City released the Golden Plexi 2. This took the original pedal’s DNA and made a couple of key tweaks, offering an easier to use gain control, and a lower noise floor.
Now, for 2025, we have the Golden Plexi V3! Still super cheap, at around $65 this time, the third iteration of this pedal also has a few new tricks up its sleeve. The basics are the same as the last versions, though: you get Volume, Tone and Gain knobs to sculpt your sound, which will take you from pushed cleans to really gnarly classic metal tones, and everything in-between.
New to the Golden Plexi 3 is a Mod switch. This two-way mini switch offers you two gain modes: switch it to the right for lower gain mode, and to the left for higher gain mode. Tone City also say on their website that these two modes give you faithful recreations of the original Golden Plexi and Golden Plexi 2 sounds. They also say that the tonal high frequencies in the new pedal have been tweaked to make it even quieter in operation.
We all know what this pedal is going to do, then… bit just how good is the Golden Plexi 3? Is it the new king of the affordable Marshall In A Box pedals? Is it the new Plexi pedal we all must have in 2025? And, is it the best budget overdrive out there? It’s time to find out! In this video, I put the Golden Plexi 3 through its paces in as many musical styles as possible, from country, folk, blues and pop to rock, punk, indie and even some metal, to hear how it versatile it truly is.
Let me know your thoughts on the Golden Plexi 3 in the comments!
Here are some links to the various playing samples and info bits:
00:00 Hello!
00:14 Introduction to the Golden Plexi 3
01:06 Pedal controls, features and info
02:46 Today’s rig and plan
03:38 Clean reference tone and turning on the Golden Plexi 3
04:01 Pushed Clean tone samples (folk, country, pop, indie, blues, funk, etc.)
05:46 Indie and alt rock tones
07:37 Classic rock tones (AC/DC, Hendrix, Airbourne, etc.)
09:52 Hard rock tones
11:37 Alternative rock tones
12:09 Punk rock tones
12:48 Modern progressive and heavy rock tones
13:56 Metal and chugging tones
15:07 Epiphone Les Paul classic rock loop – tone tweaking and Golden Plexi 2 shootout
19:27 My thoughts
19:50 Things I like: tones
21:31 Size, price, build quality
22:23 Things I don’t like
23:26 What other similar pedals are out there?
24:59 My conclusions on the Golden Plexi 3 and why you should buy it
My setup was as follows: I ran the Golden Plexi 3 into my Hughes & Kettner Black Spirit 200 head. The amp went from the Red Box DI straight into my Focusrite Scarlett 2i4, which went into Logic Pro X. That's it. No post-processing on the sounds was done.
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At Thomann:
At Sweetwater:
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Backing music from the YouTube Audio Library: Duck In The Alley – TrackTribe.
#ToneCity #GoldenPlexi #MarshallInABox #ToneCityPedals #PlexiPedal #MIAB
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