Pedal time! 1967 Vox Tone Bender

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Another great vintage fuzz pedal (yes, I'm quite into pedals lately, and mostly in fuzz boxes), the Vox Tone Bender.

Even more than in the field of  early electric guitars, the dawn of effect pedal is both full of myths and poorly documented - though everybody has an opinion about everything it seems. Who came first, what are the original components and circuits, what is the genuine sound?

And people who possess original pedals are of course reluctant to tear them apart to check what's inside - as you can see here (and you can read the whole Fuzz Central website while you're at it) early circuits were protected by a layer of paint...

And also makers had no reason to be consistent in their buildings, there were no standards, everybody was experimenting with new sounds (is it a legend or the Kinks really recorded 'You really got me' after slicing the speakers of their amps to get their infamous fuzzy sound?) 

Anyway, I've been reading many things about the Tone Bender - sometimes contradictory - so this is my version of the facts: the Vox Tone Bender was built in Italy - like Vox's guitars - by a company  called Jen, using the Tone Bender circuit provided by Sola Sound to several companies for their pedals, such as Marshall or Rotosound.

The original Vox Tone Bender was based on the MKI.V - the second version of the circuit - but there's been several later versions of both the circuit and the pedal, but since this one doesn't sport any indication, I assume it's an early model, said to have inspired the Fuzz Face.

Bertram D
 
© 2012, Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 10th year!

Pedal time 2! Dallas-Arbiter Trem Face

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While we're on a pedal trip, I'd like to add my own Dallas Arbiter pedal into the mix. Mine is the Trem Face, which I bought at a car boot sale in the early 90's. For a long time, it was pretty obscure and became almost mythical until someone found a couple of boxes of about 40 NOS examples in a warehouse and put them on the market. It's estimated there were about 100-200 made altogether, so that still makes it fairly rare. I've seen these go for a thousand dollars a few years ago to less than three hundred a year or so back on Ebay but then there was someone asking $1795 (plus shipping) in 2010 on The Gear Page.

The sound is quite nice and has a wide range and like many old pedals, the quality of the sound depends to some extent on the freshness of the battery. As the battery runs down it does start to break up a bit. Having said that, the battery does last a pretty long time.

There are a few sites showing how to make your own and as, like the Fuzz Face, it's a simple circuit, it should be fairly simple - if you can find the right Germanium transistors...

One of those sites, Geofex, has diagrams and some interesting thoughts on the construction of improved versions.

On a side note, mine stopped working a while after I bought it so I took into the old Vox shop in Charing Cross Road (Macari's) and asked them to repair it. I had an old Colorsound pedal (which also didn't work) and I offered that in a straight exchange for fixing the Trem Face. When I pulled it out of my bag, the shop guy called the other guys over. They had never seen one before and as they were the ones who'd re-issued the Colorsound range, they ought to know something about them. Anyway, they agreed and I got it fixed. It has always been in the back of my mind just what that pedal was but I never saw it re-issued so it probably was just an experiment that never caught on and was dropped. The only thing I can remember about it now was that it was brown, more modern looking that the other pedals in the range and had an "IC circuit". Hmmm.

David in Barcelona - inexplicably absent for the past few months but, hopefully with more time now.

  © 2012, Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 10th year!

Pedal time! Dallas-Arbiter Fuzz Face

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Everybody is much probably familiar enough with the Fuzz Face so I don't have to recall that it's one of the earliest effect pedals, released by Ivor Arbiter in 1966, that the round case was inspired by the base of a microphone stand, that it somehow looks like a smiling bearded face (imagine the effect on musicians on LSD back in the days), that it comprises no more than 11 electronic components - including germanium transistors (normally when they read germanium, old school guitarists get short-breathed) and contributed to the sound of Jimi Hendrix, Pete Townshend and David Gilmour... 

OK, one thing I might be able to tell that you don't know: if someone loves this pedal so much that he couldn't live any longer without a 1969 one, it would just cost US $1 795,00... (Personally, I use a 95 € Boss FZ5 modeled fuzz that in these times of vintage, analog and boutique pedals praise, nobody cares to display on their pearlboards, and I think that it sounds terrific, but who am I to say?)   

Bertram

© 2012, Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 10th year!