Big Jon Electronics Sola Sound Tone Bender MKI Tonebender Replica

Description

Big Jon Electronics
Sola Sound Tone-Bender MKI
You guys have been asking for it! A handful of these were built as one-offs, but we've finally gotten a series of Sola Sound Tone Bender MKI's done...the MKI is
the original
"Tone Bender", the one that started it all with an absolutely monstrous triple-germanium fuzz phalanx, and now we've made it work conveniently with normal 9VDC Boss-style power adapters so that it'll play nice with the rest of your pedalboard.
The controls on this pedal are actually a little bit different than the traditional Volume + Gain. The Sola Sound MKI actually has
Volume
and
Attack
- with
Attack
functioning as more of a character/integrity/presence control as well as a gain control...yeah, it really does a lot for a single knob! Lower it down really far and you get get some weird pinched sputter, put it up too high and it'll go into over-saturation. This is a really cool part of this design because it's not a dime-it-and-forget-it pedal - you really will spend some time playing with different
Attack
settings. To me, this is really the charm of the MKI, the creative soul of the designer come to life...and you get it in any of the other Tonebenders! When the series progresses to the MK1.5, it switches over to a Fuzz-Face-Style "Fuzz" knob (which may be labelled "Attack" but it's just a normal 'ol Fuzz/Gain control) and retains that style thru the various MKII / MKII Professional / MKII Reissue versions. The sound itself is very "loose" compared to the later Tonebenders, but like its TB siblings, the MKI is VERY responsive to dynamics - playing with this pedal will encourage you to really diversify your playing styles just to get the full range of sounds out of it.
The triplet of PNP Germanium transistors used in this pedal have been hand-matched from piles of different NOS transistors - because I prioritize getting the BEST sounding set possible, I don't guarantee specific types/brands, but so far we've mostly been using NOS Soviet МП-series for Q1 & Q2 with Motorola AC128's or Tesla 3AX31-series fof Q3...this has worked well so far. One popular modification that some people have requested on these is to replace the Q3 collector resistor (usually 15K, often marked "R8" in classic schematics) with a 20K trimpot...this allows you to vary the amount of output volume on tap and also varies the tone slightly - let me know if you'd be interested in this option.
The circuit is housed in a 125B-sized enclosure and powered by a standard Boss-type 9vDC center-negative jack and power supply (the normal one for pretty much everything - one is not included tho, bring your own please)...there is currently no strap for a 9v battery, but I would be happy to add one for a few $ extra. Off/on switching is True-Bypass and there's a red LED to indicate whether it's on or not. As with all of our pedals, our Tonebender is 100% hand-machined, hand-soldered, and hand-assembled in sunny Somerville, MA - we've been doing things the old-fashioned way here since 2016.
Customization requests (for certain knobs, LED's, etc.) can often be accommodated...feel free to reach out about doing a fully custom Tone-Bender build (or something else) as well! Lastly, local pickup is usually available by appointment - shoot me a message and we'll take it from there.
Thanks for looking and
long live the fuzz!
🐦