JHS shrank the Andy Timmons signature drive into a mini enclosure. $129, £116, €135, out now through JHS and the usual dealers. The AT+ stays in the line at $219.
Four knobs: Volume, Drive, EQ, Air. What's gone from the big one is the Boost knob, the boost footswitch, and the 25W/50W/100W toggle — and the Mini is permanently parked in the 100W position, which JHS says is Andy's preferred setting anyway.
Cool. So here's the thing I actually want to talk about, because every writeup of this pedal is going to say "it's the AT+ minus the boost" and stop there.
That Toggle Was Never a Wattage Switch
Nothing inside an overdrive pedal has watts. There is no power section. The 25/50/100 labels are describing a feel — what a Marshall does at different power ratings when you hit it — and the actual parameter being changed is compression and headroom.
- 25W mode: most compressed, most squish, least volume, earliest breakup. Spongy. Great feel under the fingers, easy to get lost in a mix.
- 50W: the middle.
- 100W: the least compression, the most volume, the most open and amp-like crunch. Dynamics stay intact. What you play is what comes out.
So the Mini isn't "the AT+ with a feature missing." It's the AT+ with the least compressed voicing soldered in place. That is a specific tonal choice, and whether $90 is a fair price for the other two positions depends entirely on how you're using the pedal.
Which brings me to the part that matters if you're reading this on a modeler site.
If This Is Going Into a Modeler, 100W Is the Right Mode
Stack compression is the thing nobody accounts for. Your amp block is already compressing. Your cab IR is compressing. If you're running a comp block, that's compressing. Put a squishy 25W-mode drive at the front of that chain and you get mush — a preset that feels great alone and disappears the second a band shows up.
The open, low-compression mode is the one that stacks cleanly into an already-compressed amp block. It behaves more like a boost with character and less like a second compressor. I'd argue that for modeler users, the 100W setting is the one you'd land on after an hour of A/B-ing anyway — the Mini just charges you less for skipping the hour.
This is the same logic as running a Tube Screamer with Drive at zero into a high-gain amp: you want the pedal shaping the signal, not saturating it, because the amp block is doing the saturating. And it's why where you put a drive relative to the amp changes the answer entirely.
The EQ Knob Is a High-Pass Filter and You Should Know That
This is the spec that gets glossed over. The EQ control on the AT circuit isn't a tone knob in the tilt-EQ sense — it's a high-pass filter, tightening the low end as you turn it. Air functions like an amp's presence control.
That's a genuinely different control set from a Tube Screamer, and it changes how you dial it:
- Drive 9–11 o'clock, Volume high if you want this as a boost into an already-dirty amp block. The HPF is doing the low-end tightening a TS does with its fixed mid hump, but you get to choose how much.
- Drive 12–2, EQ around noon for the amp-in-a-box thing it's actually designed for — the Mesa/Marshall-adjacent crunch the AT+ built its reputation on.
- EQ higher than you think if you're running humbuckers into a modeler. The mud you're fighting is below 150 Hz, and this knob is aimed at it. Overdrive with humbuckers covers the rest of that fight.
- Air low-to-noon with an IR that already has presence built in. IRs bring their own top end and stacking presence on presence is how you get ice pick.
If you're trying to work out where this sits against the pedals you already own, the TS808 / Klon / RAT breakdown into humbuckers is the map, and the broader TS vs Klon vs Blues Driver comparison is the one to read if you're deciding whether you need another drive at all.
Should You Buy It
I test cheap pedals against expensive ones for fun and I'm not going to pretend $129 is a wild bargain — it's a mini enclosure with fewer parts in it than the $219 version, priced accordingly. That's not a steal, that's just correct.
Buy the Mini if: you already have a boost or a clean-boost solution, your board is full, you're going into a modeler or a dirty amp, and you want one specific open crunch voicing that you don't intend to change.
Buy the AT+ if: you're using this as your primary dirt across multiple amps and rooms, or you want a footswitchable boost for solos without adding another box. That second one is a real function and it's most of what the extra $90 buys. If you're solving the solo-volume problem separately, we compared the ways to do it.
Buy neither if you're chasing Andy Timmons' actual sound and think a pedal is the shortcut. It isn't — his tone is a Mesa Lone Star and a lot of right-hand control. The pedal gets you the front end. The rest is practice, which is annoying but true.
