Tone City Holy Aura | The best value for money high gain drive pedal in 2025? In-depth Review & Demo

This is the Tone City Holy Aura: an affordable high-gain overdrive/distortion pedal (with boost) based on legendary USA amplifier designs!

Grab yourself a Holy Aura here: https://thmn.to/thoprod/579815?offid=...

The Holy Aura is an amp in a box style pedal, and Tone City say it’ll turn your clean amplifier into an American-flavored distortion monster! By USA amps, we can assume they’re referring to amps by the likes of Soldano or MESA Boogie, or possibly even the legendary 5150.

And, being a Tone City product, the Holy Aura does this for little money: as of summer 2025, it’s around $115/€115/£99, making it a massively tempting option for guitarists on a budget.

There are 8 controls on this pedal, but the Boost side – it’s a clean boost, by the way – only gets a single one: the imaginatively-named Boost. On the drive side, though, you have seven controls with which to sculpt and shape your tones.

You get a three-band EQ (Bass, Mid and High), Volume, Gain, and mini knobs for Presence and Tight. Tight will control the response and pick attack of the pedal, and Presence your high mids and treble frequencies.

You can run both sides of the pedal together, or on their own, and Tone City say the Holy Aura will give you anything from a subtle clean boost all the way through to huge walls of thick, distorted goodness.

Well, it’s time to put that to the test and see how good the Holy Aura really is! In this video, I use my Fender Telecaster (for single coil tones) and my humbucker-equipped Epiphone Les Paul to put the pedal through its paces in as many musical styles as possible, from country, folk, blues and pop to rock, punk, indie and metal, to hear how it versatile it truly is.

Let me know your thoughts on the Holy Aura in the comments!

Here are some links to the various playing samples and info bits:

00:00 Introduction to the Holy Aura
00:55 Pedal controls, features and info
02:33 Today’s rig and plan

03:40 Clean reference tone and turning on the Holy Aura (both guitars)

Epiphone Les Paul/Humbucker Tones
04:15 Pushed clean and drive tones with the Boost side of the pedal
06:06 From the Boost to the Drive side of the pedal: classic rock tones
07:10 Hard rock tones
08:31 Punk rock tones
09:22 Metal and chugging tones

Fender Telecaster/Single Coil Tones
10:48 Pushed clean and drive tones with the Boost side of the pedal
12:13 From the Boost to the Drive side of the pedal: indie rock tones
12:39 Classic rock tones
13:30 Hard rock tones
14:41 Punk rock tones
15:08 Modern progressive and heavy rock tones
16:41 Metal and chugging tones

18:07 Heavy modern rock loop (w/Les Paul) – tone tweaking

24:34 My thoughts: tones and versatility
25:55 There’s a gap in the gain levels here
26:45 Price, value for money, build quality, looks
27:07 Things I don’t like
28:31 What other similar pedals are out there you should consider?
29:19 My conclusions on the Holy Aura and why you should buy it

My setup was as follows: I ran the Holy Aura into my Hughes & Kettner Black Spirit 200 head. The amp went from the Red Box DI straight into my Focusrite Scarlett 2i4, which went into Logic Pro X. That's it. No post-processing on the sounds was done.

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At Thomann: https://thmn.to/thocf/jkhog8l06m
At Sweetwater: https://sweetwater.sjv.io/LXqdE0
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Backing music from the YouTube Audio Library: Duck In The Alley – TrackTribe.

#ToneCity #ToneCityPedals #HolyAura #DistortionPedal #Andertons #AndertonsMusic

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