Orange Amp’s Guitar Butler serves up two preamp channels on a platter

As the music world dives into 2022, Orange Amplification cooked up a brand new product for guitarists to enjoy. The Guitar Butler is a dual-channel guitar preamp in a stomp-box format. The pedal offers its players a wide palette of tone selections with clean gain staging all the way through. Because of its heavy range of flexibility, users may find The Guitar Butler is quite a hefty product compared to most other pedals. Here, we’ll dive into The Guitar Butler from Orange Amplification, and all it can offer.

Orange Amp’s “The Guitar Butler”

Let’s face it, no matter what playing situation you’re in, whether stage, studio, or at home, a preamp is always needed. Back in 2020, Orange put out its first “Butler” product, The Bass Butler. The company initially created that unit in particular to eliminate some common obstacles around bass preamplification. Because of its popularity, guitar players asked Orange for a similar product suited towards their instrument. Thus, The Guitar Butler project began. The end result we have now offers two channels of preamps, suited tonally specific to the guitar.

The first ‘clean’ channel uses vintage voicing for truer and richer clean tones. The second ‘dirty’ channel comes equipped with an all-analog JFET circuit, which effectively produces a 70’s era drive. These two channels have their own set of tone control knobs, each with a three-band EQ and individual gain control, running horizontally across the pedal’s center. Where a sine wave graphic depicts the pedal’s ‘clean’ channel, the ‘dirty’ uses a square wave. Both channels are selectable using the stomp-switch at the bottom-right. The other knob allows users to switch between either of the dirty channel’s two volume controls.

Because of Orange’s simplicity in design, all it will likely take is a few minutes for players to fully understand and become suited into The Guitar Butler’s controls. Finally, its outputs offer both 1/4″ outs for amp sends, and balanced XLR’s for direct PA patching. Orange’s Guitar Butler is available for preorder right now, priced at $429. While it may seem a bit steep, Orange has quite the reputation for its guitar products, so hopefully its audible results will make for a worthwhile purchase. To learn more about The Guitar Butler, check out its product page here, or head straight to Guitar Center to buy for yourself.