NUX Ace Of Tone Dual Overdrive | Tube Screamer + Bluesbreaker in one box on a budget! Review & Demo

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This is the NUX Ace Of Tone dual overdrive pedal!

At Sweetwater:

The Ace Of Tone is basically two drive pedals in one box, combining the NUX Morning Star – their take on the classic Bluesbreaker circuit – and the NUX Tube Man MKII, the brand’s Tube Screamer homage. And of course it’s all done to NUX’s typical price structure – which is pretty darn affordable. The Ace Of Tone costs around €100/$100.

The Morning Star is a low to medium gain transparent overdrive, while the Tube Man MKII is what NUX call a Tube Screamer with more gain and clarity. Both sides of the pedal have a second mode, too – the Morning Star has Shine mode, which adds more top-end sparkle to your tone, while the Tube Man MK II’s Fat mode adds a hefty chunk of bottom end (something often missing in TS tones!). You access these second modes by holding down the relevant footswitch for around half a second.

Other than that, the Ace Of Tone is easy to control – each side of the pedal has a Level, Drive and Tone control, and there’s also a toggle switch to let you choose which side of the pedal runs into the other, which is useful when stacking the two sides together. On the top of the pedal, you also have switches to toggle between 9 and 18 volt modes, and true and buffered bypass modes.

All this said, the Ace Of Tone should be an extremely versatile pedal – and that’s what we’re going to test in this video! I use my Fender Telecaster and my Epiphone Les Paul (for single coil and humbucker tones) to test the Morning Star and the Tube Man MKII sides of the pedal individually, and then together, all in a range of my favorite musical styles. After that, I do a loop with each guitar where I tweak the pedal’s controls to show you all the extremes you can get with it.

Here’s the links to the various playing samples and info bits:

00:00 Hello!
00:41 Introduction to the NUX Ace Of Tone
01:28 Ace Of Tone controls and the Morning Star and Tube Man MKII circuits
03:25 Today’s rig

Bluesbreaker/Morning Star tones
04:17 Clean reference tones and turning on the Ace Of Tone
04:39 Blues riff
05:05 Poppy barre chords
05:36 Country ballad arpeggios
06:03 Atmospheric indie pop droning chords
06:43 Indie pop picked arpeggios
07:20 Airbourne inspired classic rock riff
07:42 Hendrix inspired classic rock riff
08:15 AC/DC inspired classic rock riff
08:49 60s pop rhythm tone
09:09 Indie rock barre chords
10:00 Edgy indie rhythm tone
10:27 Indie octave chords riff

Tube Screamer/Tube Man MKII tones
11:16 Clean reference tones and turning on the Ace Of Tone
11:44 Blues riff
12:10 Southern rock picked arpeggios
12:32 Country lead sound
12:47 Greta Van Fleet inspired classic rock riff
13:12 AC/DC inspired classic rock riff
13:42 Hendrix inspired classic rock riff
14:16 Classic rock riff
14:49 Thick indie rhythm tone
15:21 Indie pop droning riff
15:46 Ascending indie chords
16:13 The Strokes inspired indie riff

Stacked tones (both sides on!)
16:35 Classic hard rock riff
17:11 Hard rock riff
17:44 Glam rock riff
18:11 Pop punk riff
18:38 Pop punk melodic lead sound
19:09 Punk rock power chords
19:37 Progressive rock riff (Drop D tuning)
20:08 Modern hard rock palm muted riff (Drop D)
20:56 Rage Against The Machine inspired riff (Drop D)
21:28 Hardcore chugging riff (Drop D)
21:59 Hardcore punk riff (Drop D)
22:29 Thrash metal riff (Drop D)
22:50 Hard rock melodic sound (Drop D)
23:14 Classic heavy metal/sludge riff (Drop D)

24:18 Fender Telecaster indie rock loop
28:26 Epiphone Les Paul hard rock loop

32:10 My thoughts
32:33 The Bluesbreaker/Morning Star side
33:18 The Tube Screamer/Tube Man MKII side
34:36 Stacking the two sides together
35:51 Advantages of dual overdrive pedals
36:36 What I didn’t like: delay and signal loss when switching
38:31 The switches on the top don’t seem to do anything
39:01 The Tube Man MKII side has a little too much gain for me
39:48 What other dual overdrives are out there?
42:04 Final conclusions and goodbye


My setup was as follows: I ran the Ace Of Tone into my Hughes & Kettner Black Spirit 200 head. That went from the Red Box DI into my Focusrite Scarlett 2i4, which went into Logic Pro X. No post-processing on the sounds was done. I used my TC Electronic Ditto Looper for the loops.

Here’s some links to those bits of gear:

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H&K Black Spirit 200 head:
TC Electronic Ditto Looper:
Focusrite 4i4:
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Enjoy!


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Backing music from the YouTube Audio Library: Duck In The Alley – TrackTribe.

#NUXPedals #DualOverdrive #TubeScreamer #Bluesbreaker #TransparentOverdrive #OverdrivePedal

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