MXR Ships the EVH Modern High Gain — A Pedal Built Around 5150 III Channel 3, Not the Brown Sound

MXR started shipping the EVH Modern High Gain pedal on April 28. List price is $269.99 in the US, £279 in the UK, €289 in Europe.

This is not the same product as the older MXR EVH 5150 Overdrive. The 5150 Overdrive was aimed at the "brown sound" — the gain structure most people associate with the original 5150 and, by extension, Channel 2 of the 5150 III. The Modern High Gain is built around Channel 3 — the red lead channel — which is a different circuit with a different gain staging and different low-end behavior. If you have spent any time with a 5150 III head, you already know these channels do not interchange.

That distinction is the entire point of this pedal, and it is worth explaining why it matters before getting to the controls.

What Channel 3 Actually Does

Channel 3 on the 5150 III is the channel that modern metal and progressive players use for rhythm and lead work that needs more saturation, more compression, and a tighter low-end response than Channel 2 will give you without help.

If you measure the two channels at the same perceived gain setting, Channel 3 has more sustain on a held note, more compression on the attack transient, and a low-end roll-off point that sits higher in frequency — meaning it cleans up the sub-100Hz region that Channel 2 can leave loose under fast palm muting. That is why most players running a 5150 III for djent or modern metal rhythm work end up on Channel 3 with a tube screamer in front, rather than Channel 2 boosted further.

Compressing that channel into a pedal is a different engineering problem than compressing Channel 2. The Modern High Gain is the result of MXR working that problem with EVH's team, originally co-designed in 2015 and now finally a shipping production unit.

Controls That Address the Actual Problem

The control layout reflects what high-gain players need to dial in:

• Gain, Output, Bass, Mid, Treble — the standard five-knob amp-in-a-box layout
• Bass Shift toggle (55Hz / 80Hz) — switches the bass center frequency
• Boost switch — additional gain stage for solos
• Noise Gate (mini-dial) — built-in gate, threshold-adjustable

The Bass Shift switch is the detail that earns this pedal a place on the board over the older 5150 Overdrive. Setting the bass center at 55Hz gives you a fatter low end appropriate for standard tuning and mid-tempo riffing. Switching to 80Hz cuts the sub-low region and tightens the response — that is the setting for drop tunings and faster palm muting, where 55Hz of low-end energy starts to feel woolly under speed.

This is the same trade-off you make on a real 5150 III by reaching for a tube screamer in front of the amp to clean up the low end. The 80Hz setting on the Bass Shift accomplishes a related goal at the input stage of the pedal, before the gain circuit, which is the right place for that intervention. It does not replace a tube screamer entirely — they do different things to the input impedance and the harmonic content — but for most playing contexts, the 80Hz setting is enough on its own.

The onboard noise gate matters for the same reason every high-gain rig needs one: a Channel 3 gain structure with no gate is unusable in a quiet room. Having it integrated means one fewer pedal in the chain and one fewer thing to misconfigure.

What This Pedal Is For If You Already Run a Modeler

Most of the people reading this are running a Helix, Quad Cortex, Kemper, FM9, or TONEX — and every one of those platforms has a 5150 III model with all three channels selectable. So the obvious question is: why would you put an analog hardware Channel 3 pedal on a board if your modeler already does this?

There are two real answers.

First — for hybrid rigs. If you run a clean tube amp on stage and want a high-gain channel that is genuinely a circuit, not a model, this pedal gives you that for $270. It will sound different from your modeler's 5150 III block. Whether different is better is a question only your ears in a room can answer, but it is a legitimate reason to add this to a clean-amp rig.

Second — for direct comparison work. If you have spent time A/B'ing your modeler's 5150 III Channel 3 model against the actual amp and want to add a third reference point, the Modern High Gain pedal into a clean front end is a useful data point. The pedal is not the amp, but it is closer in some respects than a model is in others, and triangulating between three references — model, amp, pedal — tells you more about what each is doing than two references do.

For everyone else who is already happy with their modeler's 5150 III block, this pedal is not necessary. It is a circuit-based interpretation of a specific channel from a specific amp, sold to a specific player. That is a narrow audience, but it is also an audience that knows exactly what it wants and will get its $270 of value out of this thing.

Dig Deeper on Fader & Knob

• Our high-gain rhythm tone guide breaks down the signal chain choices that separate a tight, articulate Channel-3 rhythm from a loose mess — the same trade-offs the Bass Shift switch is making.
• The Helix 5150 III block walks through the differences between Channel 1, 2, and 3 inside the modeler, with parameter targets for each channel.
• If you are running a hybrid rig, the pedal-into-modeler routing guide covers the input-impedance and gain-staging considerations that determine whether an external drive sounds right going into a digital front end.