Cornerstone Gladio Double Preamp Review

Have you ever played a pedal that blew your socks off when you hit that first chord? Well this is one of those pedals. Let me introduce Cornerstone Music Gear’s Gladio double preamp pedal.

Cornerstone is a small family-owned and operated company based in Italy, run by the trio of Emilio Massari, his beautiful wife Linda, and Lorenzo, a former customer turned employee. This small but passionate company has proven to the world that a small footprint can still take huge strides, while still having a massive impact on the guitar community and drive the boutique pedal market in a new direction. The journey of the Gladio has interesting beginnings. During the Gladio’s inception, Cornerstone was very intentional in their efforts to replicate the soulful, expressive tones of Robben Ford and Sonny Landreth. This is where dropping names can sometimes pigeon hole a pedal into a specific category, but let me assure you that is one versatile beast.

Tech Talk

The Gladio Double preamp in its very robust aluminum enclosure houses the secret sauce. The foot switches and mini toggles are mounted solidly to the enclosure, and the knobs sport a retro Dumble-ish look and are easy to read and manipulate. Internally the pedal is a cleanly laid out quality PCB with all of the wiring, and components and switches are wired very clean and neatly. It’s quite obvious to this reviewer that Cornerstone’s attention to detail and quality control is first rate.

The Gladio is an innovative boost with simple gain volume and tone controls for both channels. There are mini toggle controls for compression on/off on channel one, and a jazz/rock setting on the second channel. The Gladio drive channels while outwardly having a similar look, are actually very different from each other, the left side offers a softer clipping circuit that captures sweet buttery tones, but it is capable of fatter sweet compressed and more distorted tones via the comp toggle, which adds a little more compression, less headroom but more gain to the tone when engaged.

The Second channel offers less compression and more headroom. This side of the circuit has harder clipping, but still retains warmth with thick and airy tones with more gain. The mini toggle in the rock setting gives us more gain, mids, and a little more high end. The jazz setting will yield a slightly darker sound but still remains well defined. There’s something to be said for hard clipping circuits, which dial out the harshness when you sweep through tones. The Gladio instead offers creamy singing overdrive on both sides of the fence. There are more than blues tones to be had, you can also call up any number hefty classy bluesy and heavier rock tones with plenty of tonal variations if you take the time to learn the interaction between the channels and tweak to taste. Lastly, while both channels can be run independent of each other, they can also be combined for serious power chords and searing leads.

All of the switching options were highly functional and interactive, and the tonal variations in the Gladio were staggering.

How Does the Gladio Double Preamp Sound?

We ran the Gladio through my dual-humbucker Stratocaster and standard Telecaster-style guitars into a Boss IR-2 direct to great effect for our demo. I also ran it into my Fender amp and it was no surprise that the Gladio was right at home with both guitars and gear. We dialed in some great warm pushed boost tones all the way into thick overdrive and got some surprisingly great high gain tones, which led to some really fun extended playing sessions.

The Gladio was able to belt out some really great thick chord voicing, yet the notes had great definition even at higher gain settings. We took the pedal around the dials to see if we could dial in a bad tone. There was none to be had anywhere in the pedal. The Cornerstone Gladio is not only a well made pedal, but the tones are extremely inspiring and fun, especially when you can find endless variations combining the channels in new ways.

Running the pedal’s channels individually gave us some really good results, but the combinations of switching between the compression and jazz/rock settings made the Gladio an extremely versatile and fun tone factory that will please any discerning blues and rock player. This pedal has made it onto my board and it is likely to stay. Check our demo of the Gladio and Cornerstone Music Gear’s offerings. They’re sure to have more great surprises up their sleeves. The Gladio Double is now discontinued but they can still be had via Reverb and other popular online pre-owned gear vendors. Try a Gladio double preamp out for yourself, you won’t regret it. See you guys in the next one.