The Tube King has a similarly big, amp-like tone as Butler's Tube Driver, with perhaps slightly more gain available. Later versions were manufactured by Ibanez in Japan and featured a high quality noise suppression circuit, but otherwise were identical to the originals. In fact, the original Tube Kings were just a slight variation on the BK Butler Tube Driver, designed and built by Butler himself, for Ibanez, in Denver. Ibanez Tube King TK999US: The original Ibanez Tube King overdrive was a very different beast than the reissued version in the red diamond-shaped box, which seems to be a rather bland, metal-oriented high gain distortion.
#12au7 guitar tubes bk butler tube driver driver
Butler Audio sells its handmade, original Tube Driver direct for $299. It also performs best with clean, high-wattage amplifiers with plenty of headroom (such as the Hiwatt amps that Mr. The Tube Driver is well-suited to tube swaps, sounding mellower and somewhat more compressed with a 12AU7, rather than the stock 12AX7. Eric Johnson, Joe Satriani, and Billy Gibbons have also done their part to canonize the Tube Driver's huge, dynamic overdrive and boost tones. The Tube Driver is legendary mostly because of its association with David Gilmour, who has used two of them on his board since the early 1990's and his work on Pink Floyd's Division Bell.
Here are a few of my favorite fire bottle-powered stompboxes:īK Butler Tube Driver: The BK Butler Tube Driver has a sordid manufacturing history, having been made at various times and various places under both the Tube Works and Chandler names, before finally being produced in original form again by Butler himself, via his company, Butler Audio. How much the tiny tubes in these pedals' hearts influence their sound, I cannot say with authority, but they do sound fabulous either way. All of these criticisms leveled at valve-based pedals are valid and contain some measure of truth, but in spite of this, there are at least a handful of tube tone boxes that are universally regarded as classics. Tube stompboxes also have a somewhat deserved reputation for being more expensive, noisy, and delicate than their solid-state brethren, when many of these solid-state pedals are capable of sounding just as good or better, making one wonder whether tube-based pedal designs are worth the trouble, or are little more than marketing gimmicks. Because these tubes often don't glow in the context of a pedal circuit, some companies put an orange LED behind them to give players the illusion of a fiery bottle of tone sitting at their feet, furthering the deception. It sees very little actual voltage and plays little or no part in the sound of the pedal.
Another criticism of tube pedal designs is that, in many of them, the tube is essentially just decoration.
Tube drive and distortion pedals function much like a tube preamp, and typically use the same 12AX7/ECC83 type tubes, so obviously a pedal with one little 12AX7 in it cannot possibly approximate the tone of, say, a quartet of raging E元4's. Tube preamp distortion-without the benefit of equal or greater amounts of power tube distortion to go with it-can be as gritty and unappealing as any ugly solid-state grind.
For one thing, most of the lively, complex, delicious tone and feel that we associate with a good tube amp emanates from the saturation of the amplifier's power tubes, rather than its preamp tubes. While guitar players have been conditioned for years to believe that anything with tubes must automatically sound better than any similar thing without tubes, the truth is that all valve-based circuits are not equal. There has been much debate in the guitar community about the quality and relative usefulness of tube-based pedals.
0 kommentar(er)
