Just Announced: NEW Warm Audio Foxy Tone Fuzz and Jet Phaser
Published on 12 October 2020
Welcome to the nastiest fuzz you have ever heard in your entire life.
Seriously.
Warm Audio have just released two new pedals, and they are both pretty fantastic. One is a vintage phaser, and the other is the nastiest fuzz you’ve ever heard in your life.
Foxy Tone Box Fuzz
Fuzz aficionados will instantly recognise what’s happening here. The Foxy Tone Box Fuzz is an altogether excellent reissue of the overwhelmingly horrid and off-puttingly expensive Foxx Tone Machine from the 70s. The original is a ferocious square wave germanium fuzz pedal with a switchable octave up to really sell those wild screaming overtones. It’s an outrageous sound and is perhaps the funnest fuzz box of all: it’s even covered in velvet flocking! Bands like ZZ Top and Nine Inch Nails have made use of this furry little beast, so you know it’s going to be a ‘statement’ effect!
Warm Audio’s reissue is entirely successful. Clad in orange velvet, this is a wolf in sheep’s clothing indeed! The Foxy Tone is proper square-wave fuzz, with an attention-grabbing tone that rips through a mix. Warm Audio have sourced New Old Stock Germanium 2N3565 transistors for a truly authentic tone. These transistors are paired with Germanium diodes and high-watt carbon resistors, so everything under that fluffy hood is top quality, audiophile, boutique stuff. Your guitar sound gets mangled beyond redemption, of course, but the pedal does it in a very capable manner!
Three side-mounted control knobs and a switch for the octave is all you need to wreak unforgettable harm on your tone. It’s a madly expressive sound, especially for those lead moments where you really pull on the strings or play unison bends: just listen out for those screaming overtones! We’re very glad to have this pedal available in an authentic form, with a realistic price.
Jet Phaser
Everyone loves a good ‘phaser moment’, whether it’s Gilmour’s Crazy Diamond arpeggio or the late, great Eddie’s ‘Aint Talkin’ About Love’ riff: lots of iconic guitar moments are built with the help of a phaser pedal’s immortal ‘whoosh’.
One famous pedal was the Jet Phaser, made by Roland in the 70s. It was an eccentric two button affair which a built-in fuzz if you needed it! Warm Audio have does us all a second solid by resurrecting this tone monster in the guise of the Warm Audio Jet Phaser.
Like the Foxy Tone Box Fuzz, the madness found inside the original Jet phaser is very much intact here! We love the cool, authentic metal enclosure with its retro knobs and wooden ends. It’s a beautiful piece of design and is super-solid. It’s 18v, so you can use two PP3 batteries or plug in the included adaptor. This is good because, as pedal geeks will know, this gives the signal much more headroom, and therefore a cleaner phase if you want it.
You may want that, and this pedal more than delivers, but there are 6 modes here and some of them bring a fuzz sound into the mix! Select one of the Jet modes and dime that ‘Jet level’ to get a ridiculous solo sound that’s full of movement and expression. The different modes have their own modulation depths – from subtle to really rather over the top – and there’s a dedicated Fast/Slow footswitch to bring on the fastest sweep, regardless of how you’ve adjusted the settings.
This thing is just so much fun! Yes, you can certainly dial up your favourite ‘Dark Side’ settings or whatever, and enjoy a lush and deep phaser. All good phaser pedals do this though, right? Not all of them give you such excessive levels of ‘out there’ tones, though, backed up with added fuzz and real-time ability to change mod speed. Will you use this pedal on every song? We’d say that you maybe shouldn’t, but that you probably will!
Final Thoughts
In a world where we get new pedals coming through every single month, it can be easy to become blasé to yet another fuzz pedal and yet another phaser. Let us assure you, then, that these two offerings from Warm Audio are almost like nothing else available. They are super-high quality, the authenticity is built in, but more importantly than all of that: they sound exceptional and make you want to play and play and play.
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