Lately I have been working on a scratch built re-creation VOX Tone Bender fuzz box. Back in the 60's my older brother had one and I played his Fender Jazzmaster into his Fender Blackface 4x10 amp and just wailed away. It was so cool!


Fast forward to today and I am recording a song that needs that vintage warm gritty fuzz tone, so I built one! Here it is on my breadboard plugged into a 1967 Fender Super Reverb. With my mongrel Tele it sounds like what I remember from when I was 15 years old! What fun!

Very cool.


I need to fix a couple Fuzzfaces, love that gritty grit 

Super sweet. There's a guy in Spain (Manlay Sound) who builds awesome Tone Bender clones.

Wow so cool! I wish I knew where all the wires went haha!

Yep, it's going to be fun trying to transfer it all over to a circuit board and an enclosure...

I'd be going back . . . . . to a Gibson Ripper and a Peavey BASS head and 215BW cabinet.

That's NOT going to happen.

Quote from: bigredbass on June 29, 2020, 05:16:32 PM
I'd be going back . . . . . to a Gibson Ripper and a Peavey BASS head and 215BW cabinet.

That's NOT going to happen.

Well, the 215 sounds like a good idea (if you have someone to hump it for you, anyway), but good call on the other 2.

Peter

I still have a Tone Bender that I got when I was 15. It was stuffed inside the back of an amp I got. In the long run, it was the better part of the deal.

Tone Bender Pictures!!
I just biased the transistors in my build, after transferring the circuit onto a PC board. Now to just stuff it into an enclosure.
One of my goals in building it was to just use parts I already had around.
There are a ton of do it yourself stomp boxes out there. I am looking at a Klon kit for about $40 that would be fun to do.

Steve Kimock was using a Mutron III into a Tonebender for a while. Very cool tone.