MichaelW
Well-known member
- Build Rating
Catching up on a couple of build reports. No demo yet but this one's pretty neat, I'll be doing a demo for this one.
I had never heard of this pedal before coming across it in the PPCB catalog. Seeing that it was an MI Audio pedal got me interested as I've been on a bit of an MI Audio kick. I really like the "Blues Lawyer" that I recently built. (But not so much the "Blues Captain")
Watching some YouTube demo's of the Tube Zone it's apparent that there's been a few revisions. I "think" the one @Robert has traced here is the "version 4" that has 6 knobs. But Robert added a 7th knob by exposing the internal "presence" control as a knob. So a 7 knob OD/Distortion pedal....yikes!!! What did I get myself into?
This thing has a LOT of controls but interestingly, they all do something useful, including the Presence control, in shaping the sound of the pedal.
Right off the bat it's a pretty "in your face" high gain distortion pedal but as its namesake suggests, it's very "amp-y" sounding. Big huge soundstage
and sounds bit like there's some SLO/5150/Uberschall DNA in it. It does the high gain amp thing really well. But if that was all it did, I'd be disappointed on a 7 freaking knob dirt pedal...heh.
What's really interesting is that it can also do the low gain thing pretty well and all shades gain levels all the way up to the high gain thing.
I've actually been playing it the last couple days as a low gain pedal and really enjoying it.
The knobs are unintuitive in their nomenclature as well as function. I had to find and download the manual for the Tube Zone 4.x. Once decoded, it started to make sense and I could figure out what I was doing with my knob tweaking.
Anyway, stay tuned for the demo and I'll give a little deeper into the knob functions.
BOM called for an A50k Dual pot and a B20k. Neither of which I had on hand. So I did the parallel resistor on an A100k Dual and a B25k to get the right values.
The circuit topology is reminiscent of the Crunchbox/Guvnor.
I had never heard of this pedal before coming across it in the PPCB catalog. Seeing that it was an MI Audio pedal got me interested as I've been on a bit of an MI Audio kick. I really like the "Blues Lawyer" that I recently built. (But not so much the "Blues Captain")
Watching some YouTube demo's of the Tube Zone it's apparent that there's been a few revisions. I "think" the one @Robert has traced here is the "version 4" that has 6 knobs. But Robert added a 7th knob by exposing the internal "presence" control as a knob. So a 7 knob OD/Distortion pedal....yikes!!! What did I get myself into?
This thing has a LOT of controls but interestingly, they all do something useful, including the Presence control, in shaping the sound of the pedal.
Right off the bat it's a pretty "in your face" high gain distortion pedal but as its namesake suggests, it's very "amp-y" sounding. Big huge soundstage
and sounds bit like there's some SLO/5150/Uberschall DNA in it. It does the high gain amp thing really well. But if that was all it did, I'd be disappointed on a 7 freaking knob dirt pedal...heh.
What's really interesting is that it can also do the low gain thing pretty well and all shades gain levels all the way up to the high gain thing.
I've actually been playing it the last couple days as a low gain pedal and really enjoying it.
The knobs are unintuitive in their nomenclature as well as function. I had to find and download the manual for the Tube Zone 4.x. Once decoded, it started to make sense and I could figure out what I was doing with my knob tweaking.
Anyway, stay tuned for the demo and I'll give a little deeper into the knob functions.
BOM called for an A50k Dual pot and a B20k. Neither of which I had on hand. So I did the parallel resistor on an A100k Dual and a B25k to get the right values.
The circuit topology is reminiscent of the Crunchbox/Guvnor.
