Benson Amps Deep Sea Diver Fuzz-Echo Pedal

A WORD FROM JESSICA
“When Benson first asked me what I wanted out of a pedal, I asked if he could smash together my favorite fuzz tones and vintage echos. One of my favorite pedal configurations has always been running my echos & delays before my dirt pedals to get unorthodox sounds. So, we started there and it morphed into a pedal than became bigger and wider than what we initially had imagined.

To call this simply a ‘gated fuzz pedal with an echo feature’ would be an injustice to its essence! Beyond the splatty gated sounds, I wanted a fuzz that could get wooly and straight forward, or shake hands with my favorite gauzy My Bloody Valentine textures. I wanted it to clean up nice and work as a treble booster for my guitar solos, or sound like a foreign landscape of oscillation and interrupting textures. Simply put, it has become the most interesting and versatile pedal on my board.”

STRONG FLAVORS
Over the last 3 (!) years, we’ve been working with our long time friend and associate Jessica Dobson from the Seattle band Deep Sea Diver to take her signature sound (fuzz and delay) and put it into one box. We started with a silicon three-transistor fuzz variant (kind of a deranged mashup of mk1.5 and mk2) and tweaked it into oblivion. Its two main controls (bias and gate) cover a wide range of sounds from agressive treble booster to thick, dark textured fuzz to the gated skronky sounds often found in the Deep Sea Diver discography. These controls are interactive and change the EQ and distortion profile with even small tweaks...a lot of fun to be had!

The echo is from a tweaked data-sheet PT2399 that is perfectly tuned to the fuzz side and has the standard time, feedback and level (echo) controls. Holding down the footswitch will send the echo into sustained feedback at some settings, which, in conjunction with a short delay time, is a sound that can be found all over DSD records. We recommend holding this down....whenever.

One unique feature of the Fuzz-Echo is the ability to change the fuzz and echo orders...this is done by powering the pedal on while the footswitch is depressed. The LED will be green if fuzz is before echo, and orange if echo is before fuzz (this is our favorite)

The Fuzz-Echo does not care where it is in the signal chain, or what guitar (or bass! or synth!) is used. It will have a small amount of hiss, even on “cleaner” settings. If you find yourself thinking about the hiss, our advice is to play a guitar solo instead!