What is a legend worth once you can build it yourself in ten minutes? Bill Finnegan made roughly 8,000 Klon Centaurs in Boston between late 1994 and 2008, and by 2024 used listings had climbed as high as $20,000, according to the Klon Centaur entry on Wikipedia. This month the circuit that inspired all that money became the left half of a $299 pedal.
The JHS Wanderer, announced October 14, puts the company’s NOTAKLÖN (its Klon-style drive) and the Morning Glory V4 (its Bluesbreaker-style drive) side by side in one vertical enclosure. It sells for $299 at Guitar Center and £299 at Andertons.
On paper it’s two pedals JHS already sells, glued together. In practice it closes out a story JHS has been telling for almost twenty years, and the most useful thing about it is a small toggle most launch coverage skipped past.
From $20,000 listings to half of a $299 pedal
Both circuits on the Wanderer come out of the two most argued-over overdrives in boutique history, and JHS has a personal stake in each.
The Morning Glory is the older one. Marshall released its Blues Breaker overdrive in 1991, and Delicious Audio calls the Morning Glory “the pedal that put JHS on the map,” noting it has become more famous than the Marshall original. Scott was modding Boss pedals in Jackson, Mississippi in 2007 under the name JHS Mods; the business became JHS Pedals in mid-2008, and the JHS Pedals history lists the Morning Glory among his earliest designs and the pedal that helped establish the brand. We covered where that circuit ended up in our Morning Glory V4 breakdown.
The Klon side is messier, and more fun. In 2021 Scott listed what is considered the first Klon Centaur Finnegan ever built on Reverb for $500,000, a stunt Gearnews covered as a jab at used-market pricing. Finnegan himself had tried to cool things off with the KTR in 2014 at $269. Then JHS answered the problem its own way: the NOTAKLÖN, a solderless, IKEA-style kit pedal released in 2024 that buyers partly assemble themselves. According to MusicRadar, JHS planned to make 3,000 for launch and had sold 12,000 a week later.
The Klon story didn’t calm down after that. Finnegan sued Behringer’s parent company in June 2025 over its Centaur Overdrive, and the case was dismissed after Behringer renamed the pedal Zentara (the same Wikipedia entry covers the dispute). The mystique has been fought over in court and on resale sites for a decade. The Wanderer quietly treats it as one half of a utility pedal.
Inside the Wanderer: four gain states, two sets of jacks
Here’s the layout, pulled from the Andertons spec sheet and Gearnews:
- NOTAKLÖN (left side): Volume, Gain, Treble, plus a Shamrock Mod toggle that adds about 4dB, pushes the mids and brings in an extra hard-clipping stage.
- Morning Glory V4 (right side): Volume, Drive, Tone, a Gain toggle (red LED for the hotter mode) and a Bright Cut switch to tame the top end.
- Order toggle: sets which circuit comes first when the two are stacked.
- Jacks: a main input and output for normal use, separate I/O for each circuit, and a Red Remote jack per side so a footswitch or loop switcher can flip each side’s gain mode.
- Everything else: silent soft-touch switching, buffered bypass, top-mounted jacks, 9V center-negative at 165mA, and a 4.7″ x 3.5″ x 1.5″ footprint. No power supply in the box.
Each side has two gain modes, so the pedal gives you four drive voices before you stack anything. JHS calls this the first dual pedal in its new vertical format, and the shape matters: it takes up roughly the space of one and a half standard pedals instead of a wide twin-box like the old Double Barrel.
The Order toggle is the real feature
Most dual drives fix the order at the factory. The Wanderer doesn’t, and with these two circuits the order changes what the pedal is.
NOTAKLÖN into Morning Glory is the classic boost-into-drive move. The Klon-style circuit adds volume and a midrange push, and the Morning Glory reacts by breaking up harder while keeping its open, amp-like character. It’s the same gain-staging idea players use with a Klon into a cranked amp, the trick that made the original famous in front of amps like the Dumble Overdrive Special.
Morning Glory into NOTAKLÖN works the other way around. The Bluesbreaker circuit sets your rhythm crunch, and the Klon side acts as a solo lift: louder, with more mids, so a lead cuts through a band mix without much more fizz. With the Shamrock Mod engaged, it turns into a thicker, more compressed lead tone.
The separate I/O jacks take this further. You can drop a compressor or a fuzz between the two circuits, or put each side in its own loop on a switcher and treat them as two independent pedals. If you were going to buy both drives anyway, this flexibility is what the extra money buys, not the circuits. Guitar World puts the saving at about $30 compared with buying the two pedals separately. That’s not much, so the case for the Wanderer comes down to one enclosure, two order options and remote gain switching.
Where it falls short
Some honest limits:
- It’s a low-to-medium gain box. Even with both sides stacked and both gain toggles on, this is classic rock and blues territory. If your rhythm sound lives near a 5150, look somewhere else.
- Buffered bypass only. Most boards handle that fine, and a good buffer helps long cable runs. But if you’re strict about true bypass, there’s no switch for it.
- Owners of either pedal gain little. If a Morning Glory is already on your board, a standalone NOTAKLÖN gets you most of the way for less money, and the reverse is true too.
- It’s still a Klon-style circuit, not a Klon. JHS doesn’t claim otherwise, but the Centaur’s resale value rests on the box, the gold paint and the name. None of that is on offer for $299, and the Wikipedia entry itself notes the original’s germanium diodes mostly show up at the highest gain settings, where few Klon players actually set it.
The Wanderer makes the most sense for players building a first serious board, or for anyone who keeps swapping a Bluesbreaker-style drive and a Klon-style drive in and out and wants both voices to hand. It’s not exciting the way the JHS Fumble story was, and it isn’t trying to be. Its point is that two circuits guitarists argued over for thirty years now fit comfortably on one small pedal.