New Non-BOSS Pedals

[Pepe]

I purchased this Rocktron Purple Haze a few weeks ago. It is an octave up fuzz with an octave below on demand.



It is from the early series with the solid aluminium chassis. A really dumb design flaw (I utterly hate it! ) is that the boards were slid into the chassis and then a thin flexible black cover with the controls printed on it was put over the potentiometer shafts and glued to the top of the chassis. If you want to remove the boards for maintenance or repair you will inevitably destroy this cover. I wanted to treat the crackling potentiometers with tuner spray. I wanted to remove the boards, so I carefully lifted the one side of the cover ... aaargh! The label of the first potentiometer doesn't look too nice anymore. Stupid design! Why didn't they print it on a sturdy metal plate?! You also have to be careful with the printed labelling on the chassis. Avoid cleaners that contain alcohol! I wanted to remove some bits of residue - now it's an "OCKTRON" pedal. Aaargh!



And how does it sound? Okay-ish. The octave up fuzz isn't half bad, but the octave down (octave up fuzz and the low octave can be blended with the MIX knob, each to full wet sound; the MOD knob is like a tone knob for the low octave) despite sounding nice with a very synth-like square wave tone, is just too glitchy and it doesn't work on the whole fretboard. All in all pretty much a let-down.

[laurie]

Oh my. Did it come with sunglasses?

[bigtone23]

My only guitar compressor was a 1980 Dyna Comp. I like it, It's usually set with the knobs at 'crossed eyes' or so, to try to get a more subtle compression. Having the sensitivity knob anywhere over 10 o'clock and it's pretty squashy. It doesn't see much use, as compression (for me) is often more useful with cleaner tones, and I don't play clean guitar much at all.
I use all kinds of compression and limiting with bass, though.
Found a really good deal on a used Keeley Compressor Plus. It's just a riff on the Ross, which is a riff on the Dyna Comp. Well, it's more adjustable and more useful. Being able to control the attack a bit with the single/humbucking switch, as well as the clean blend knob are welcome parameters.
It's much easier to dial in more subtle settings, and a side by side comparison with the Dyna Comp found a setting that was pretty close.
It's not studio quality, but a cool addition.

[zentropa]

I never thought I would have one of these, but I finally got an original TS9 when one popped up for $175.

Ibanez TS9.jpg (284.7 KiB) Viewed 10222 times

[Pepe]

Cool!

[bigtone23]

That TS9 is a score! It’s got a nice beat to it.
The TS is one of those mixed bag pedals…
It’s useful for many guitarists in some way. I prefer the SD1, both as a boost for a crunchy tone or for those rare times as a standalone drive on scoopy Fender BF/SF amps. The TS9 does do the boost thing well. It seems to have a little more clean signal mix than the SD1.

I got my ‘84 TS9 sometime around 93/94 for $90-100, which is around $200 in today’s money. This was during the SRV influence on TS pricing and right around the time Ibanez reissued it (for $60).

[zentropa]

The TS9 was sort of mystical to me in the first couple of years that I played guitar (1994-96) since at that time, I didn't have a ton of experience with different gear and I went off the word of mouth that they were supposed to be great. This was during the high gain arms race so at the time, the TS808 was more collectible but the TS9 was the one that was more sought after, and the store employees made sure to exaggerate how much better the original was compared to the reissue. The cheapest I ever saw an original go for in the 90s locally was $300, which was more than I paid for my guitar. I remember trying a TS9 reissue into a solid state amp back then and I hated it. It wasn't until I started owning tube amps that I understood how they could sound good. For a long time I only had Boss pedals, so they fell off my radar until I started accumulating 9-series stuff a few years ago. When I saw original TS9s going for $500-600 from 2020-2022 I considered them out of reach, but upon replacing all of my other reissues with originals, I decided to start looking again.

[bigtone23]

The TS9 was sort of mystical to me in the first couple of years that I played guitar (1994-96) since at that time, I didn't have a ton of experience with different gear and I went off the word of mouth that they were supposed to be great. This was during the high gain arms race so at the time, the TS808 was more collectible but the TS9 was the one that was more sought after, and the store employees made sure to exaggerate how much better the original was compared to the reissue. The cheapest I ever saw an original go for in the 90s locally was $300, which was more than I paid for my guitar. I remember trying a TS9 reissue into a solid state amp back then and I hated it. It wasn't until I started owning tube amps that I understood how they could sound good. For a long time I only had Boss pedals, so they fell off my radar until I started accumulating 9-series stuff a few years ago. When I saw original TS9s going for $500-600 from 2020-2022 I considered them out of reach, but upon replacing all of my other reissues with originals, I decided to start looking again.

Yeah, there was a lot of voodoo going on back then about the TS9 vs 808. In the grand scheme, the voodoo has subsided a lot and that attention is now on the hundreds of TS clones and riffs out there.
As a hype believing young man of the early 90s, I saw an ad in Vintage Guitar magazine and sent my TS9 to Analogman for what was called the '808 Mod, with brown option," which is pretty much the Silver Mod today. Can't really say it was a mind blowing tonal change, as it was very subtle at best.
However, what is really cool is that it has the 30 year old Analogman mod sticker and stamp on it. That overrides the original, but modded status of the pedal.

[laurie]

Aol.com .... wow

[zentropa]

Yeah, there was a lot of voodoo going on back then about the TS9 vs 808. In the grand scheme, the voodoo has subsided a lot and that attention is now on the hundreds of TS clones and riffs out there.
As a hype believing young man of the early 90s, I saw an ad in Vintage Guitar magazine and sent my TS9 to Analogman for what was called the '808 Mod, with brown option," which is pretty much the Silver Mod today. Can't really say it was a mind blowing tonal change, as it was very subtle at best.
However, what is really cool is that it has the 30 year old Analogman mod sticker and stamp on it. That overrides the original, but modded status of the pedal.

I tend to remember a lot of the voodoo. I "learned" about the perceptions of the TS808 the first time I ever found one in a store, which was around 1997-98 and it was like $800. I asked to give it a try and the shop owner said, "You don't want to try that one, it's a bad one." He went on to explain that only a small percentage of the TS808s sounded good/great, a bunch of them were okay, and a bunch of them were flat out bad. No one ever sold the good ones and people rarely sold the okay ones, so most of the used ones listed for sale were bad ones. This pretty much kept me from wanting one. Over time I have learned that was actually a pretty good assessment of it.

I think the TS9s had a bit of the mystique because they were far more available, usually worked, and better fit the tones of the era, but there was a premium placed on the ones with the JRC4558D chip as the sentiments were that the other chip was bad (and why many felt the reissues were also bad).

A few months ago I had a silver-modded newer Maxon OD9 and the changes were quite subtle, but I preferred the unmodded tone.