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Revive the timeless sound of the '60s with the Vintera® II '60s Telecaster® and experience the iconic looks, inspiring feel and incomparable tone that only a Fender can deliver.
The Vintera® II '60s Telecaster® features an alder body and a maple neck with rosewood fingerboard for classic Fender tone that's full of punch and clarity. The early-'60s "C" shape neck is based on a classic '60s profile for an intuitive and inviting feel, while the 7.25" radius fingerboard with vintage-tall frets provides vintage comfort with ample room for big bends and expressive vibrato. Under the hood, you'll find a pair of vintage-style '60s pickups that deliver all the crystal-clear chime and raw, steely twang that made Fender famous. The vintage-style 3-saddle bridge with slotted steel saddles offers authentic '60s twang, while vintage-style tuning machines provide classic looks with a finer gear ratio and enhanced tuning stability to complete the package.
Experience the unmistakable vintage feel and unmatched sound of a classic Fender with the Vintera® II '60s Telecaster® today and start making music history!
The one and only Cheap Trick have announced today’s premiere of their new single. The infectious and anthemic “Twelve Gates” is available now at all DSPs and streaming services. The song heralds the Rock n' Roll Hall of Famers' eagerly anticipated 21st studio album, All Washed Up, arriving via BMG on Friday, November 14 digitally as well as on standard black vinyl and CD. A limited-edition exclusive "Orange Marble" LP variant of the album, limited to 1,000 units, will be available to pre-order via the band's new D2C store.
“Our newest single release, 'Twelve Gates,' from the 2025 LP All Washed Up, is one of our best yet,” says bassist Tom Petersson. “ I really love how this song came out. It's one of my favorites on the album.”
All Washed Up was produced by the band and Julian Raymond. It was mixed by Chris Lord Alge and recorded at various studios in Nashville (Sound Emporium Studios, Blackbird, Love Shack, Zen) as well as in LA (Sweetzerland Studios) through 2024.
"Just one more great album from the best rock band in the world," says lead singer/guitarist Robin Zander.Tracklisting:
Cheap Trick have also announced Fall 2025 tour dates to add to their gloriously never-ending run. The new dates start October 12 at Oxford, AL’s Oxford Performing Center and conclude at Vibrant Music Hall in Waukee, IA on December 7. Tickets are on sale now. The complete itinerary is below.
CHEAP TRICK – TOUR 2025
AUGUST
20 – Rhinebeck, NY – Dutchess County Fair
21 – Syracuse, NY – New York State Fair
28 – Salem, OR – Oregon State Fair – LB Day Amphitheatre
31 – Pueblo, CO – Colorado State Fair
SEPTEMBER
19 – Menlo Park, CA – The Guild Theatre
20 – Napa, CA – Blue Note Napa Summer Sessions at Meritage Resort
29 – Osaka, JP – Grand Cube
OCTOBER
1 – Tokyo, JP – Budokan
11 – Miramar Beach, FL – Seascape Resort Golf Club & Tennis Resort
12 – Oxford, AL – Oxford Performing Arts Center *
21 – Huntington, NY – The Paramount *
22 – Bethlehem, PA – Wind Creek Bethlehem – Wind Creek Event Center *
24 – Atlantic City, NJ – Hard Rock Live*
25 – Lynn, MA – Lynn Memorial Auditorium *
NOVEMBER
9 – Chandler, AZ – Wild Horse Pass Hotel & Casino – The Showroom *
Montreal’s Fish Circuits, helmed by builder Mike Poisson, has made quite a splash the past few years with colorful offerings like the Model One, Lunatique, and most recently the Astronomie, a dynamic reverb that can swell in and out depending on settings and playing style. Fish Circuits’ first delay, the Echo Limiteur, comes in a characteristically sleek box that, like all their others, could be used as a bludgeon. But with an analog delay, a second digital delay, and a limiter, its utility as a tool for defense pales in comparison to the sounds its circuitry produces.
Swell Set Of Features
The Echo Limiteur consists of two delay modes, swell A and swell B. Swell A is a straightforward delay channel, governed just by the global echo and blend knobs and the range switch. The last of these shortens or lengthens the delay-time range of the echo control. “Hi” gives you longer delay times (up to 1150 milliseconds) and slightly cleaner repeats courtesy of the digital PT2399 chip, while “Lo” gives you lower-fidelity repeats and a shorter sweep of possible delay times (up to 650 milliseconds). Both swell A and swell B knobs control the number of repeats.
The limiter affects the swell B mode alone. It limits the delay feedback and can be triggered dynamically by the dry signal, wet signal, or both. This effectively means you can use infinite repeats that won’t overpower your dry sound and/or infinite repeats that reset each time you pick a note or chord. The release switch tells the limiter how quickly to lay off the limiting, while the trigger lets you decide whether a dry, wet, or combined signal activates the limiter. Limit, meanwhile, controls the sensitivity of the trigger: All the way counter-clockwise, it’s nearly non-existent, while fully clockwise, the slightest noise in your signal will trigger the limiter, chopping the repeats. All three controls are extremely interdependent.
Got it? Probably not. You have to physically experience the responses of each of these features to really grasp how they manipulate the signal. And there will be some who wish the Echo Limiteur’s switch-controlled functions were more deeply tweakable. Not me though; we are in the age of the pedal-builder-as-auteur, and I loved allowing my playing to be guided by Poisson’s preset parameters.
Push it to the Limit
Playing through the dynamic-delay side of the Echo Limiteur immediately expands the possibilities of your instrument. Because it responds to playing dynamics, it’s not exaggerating to say there are endless ways to apply the Echo Limiteur. You can set it for a cavalcade of tight, spiraling repeats that cut out sharply the second you play another note, or you can tone down the limiter so that it only cuts off the delay when you play hard. In this arrangement, you can pick delicately beneath a bed of towering, oscillating feedback and pull the plug on the delay just by strumming a bit harder. If you want to bail on the dynamic aspect entirely, you just hit the left footswitch and you’re in regular delay land (the right one is the on/off switch).
Thanks to the analog MN3005 chip, the repeats are foggy, greasy, and frayed. But the augmented repeat lengths—courtesy of the digital PT2399 chip—extend the pedal’s utility. My only gripe is that I wish the Echo Limiteur was capable of even shorter, tighter delay times. It bottoms out at roughly 100 milliseconds, which means you can’t use the dynamic limiter with the most slashing and jittery machine-gun repeats.
The Verdict
The Echo Limiteur already feels destined to be a classic. The potential applications in live contexts, in particular, are thrilling to consider, and I’m sure that in the years to come, we’ll hear new music defined by the Echo Limiteur’s many voices.
In March, Luke Bentham, front, and Kyle Fisher, on the drums, blast through a set at Vertigo Music Festival in St. Catharines, Ontario.
Tom Oddballs
Luke Bentham, guitarist and vocalist in Hamilton, Ontario, rock outfit the Dirty Nil, was in the basement caverns under the Vatican when he glimpsed something that changed the direction of his band. It was a series of bronze reliefs by Francesco Messina, depicting the horrors of war. Amid the six pieces in the series, one in particular grabbed Bentham: It showed two men in desperate hand-to-hand combat, grappling to get control of a knife. “It was the hardest piece of art I’d seen in a very long time,” says Bentham.
YouTube
Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.
He and Nil co-founder and bandmate, drummer Kyle Fisher, tried to obtain the rights to use the image for the cover of their new record, The Lash, but the Vatican wasn’t having it. “We got a cease and desist from the Vatican, and their lawyers are no joke,” Bentham says with a grin.
Still, before he left, Bentham snapped a picture of Messina’s sculpture on his phone, and it hovered over the creation of The Lash like a twisted idol. “It definitely fired me up musically for some reason,” he says. “It’s rare that I’ll see something and it’ll make me want to play my guitar a certain way, but this is one instance where it came to pass that way.”
Messina’s work took Bentham somewhere vicious and primal. It pulled him back to some of the sounds the Nil had explored earlier in their 14-year career: white noise, feedback shrieks, “sheet-metal-shaking distortion.” It made Bentham think of the work of the Jesus Lizard’s Duane Denison. “Something about this cold, metallic, brutal piece of art made me play guitar a bit more angularly, and with a much higher threshold and acceptance of microphonic and horrible feedback than I’ve been looking for on our last few albums,” he says.
Bentham’s live rig has been the same for more than a decade: a Les Paul Custom into a Marshall 1959SLP, with a Pro Co RAT or two in between.
Photo by Tom Oddballs
Enter The Lash, a scummy, barbwire-scraped slab of punk rock ’n’ roll, scarred with white-hot slashes of classic metal, hardcore, thrash, and garage rock. After the radio-ready melodies and tidy production of 2021’s Fuck Art and 2023’s Free Rein to Passion, The Lash feels like a triumphant return to the basement. “I’m incredibly proud of this record because we made it because we wanted to,” says Bentham. “I’m not a big believer in the idea that tension makes good records.”
“Something about this cold, metallic, brutal piece of art made me play guitar a bit more angularly, and with a much higher threshold and acceptance of microphonic and horrible feedback.”
To honor that energy and bring The Lash to life, Bentham and Fisher bailed on the higher-budget trappings of their previous records and went back to basics, working with local engineer and powerviolence musician Vince Soliveri at Boxcar Sound in Hamilton. When it came time to record Bentham’s vocals, Soliveri had a strange-looking mic set up. “I was like, ‘What’s this microphone? Is it something you like to use for vocals?’” Bentham recalls. “Vince was like, ‘I have no idea what it is. It just looked cool, so let’s try it out.’”
He continues, “I think Vince’s attitude towards that specific thing is a pretty good indicator of how we approached making this record, which was different from the 'tried and true' way we've made our last few. There are trade-offs when you enter that world, and complexities that enter your life and your band when it comes to staying in that world. With pretty much all of our previous records, there’s been some sort of behind-the-scenes animating force to make it a certain way or an internal pressure: ‘If we do this, then maybe we can get that.’ We basically decided for ourselves that we had fun, but we are leaving the casino.”
Those “internal pressures,” which are skewered on the new track, “Rock N’ Roll Band,” were jettisoned this time. With The Lash, the philosophy was simply, “Let’s just make a record, see what happens,” Bentham says. “It’s been a long time since I found myself in that headspace, I think probably since we made ‘Fuckin’ Up Young’ and all those songs 14 years ago.”
“We basically decided for ourselves that we had fun, but we are leaving the casino.”
Still, The Lash has moments unlike anything the Nil have produced to this point. The slow, cornered-animal growl of “This is Me Warning Ya” and the haunted-house romance of “Spider Dream” are two of the record’s doglegs into the softer end of the macabre. And the stomping “That Don’t Mean It Won’t Sting,” is unexpectedly intro’d by cello and xylophone, thanks to violinist and friend Sara Danae.
Even as the band has grown, Bentham’s rig has scarcely changed. His calling-card tone for the past decade has been a 1975 Gibson Les Paul Custom, tuned to E-flat standard, through a Pro Co RAT (or two, with the second set to “drop the hammer”) and into a Marshall 1959SLP head and a Marshall 8x10 cabinet. Bentham admits he’s pretty hard on his guitars—the ’75, which has a stock pickup in the neck and an early production DiMarzio Super Distortion in the bridge, has had its headstock broken on more than one occasion.
While recording The Lash, though, Bentham changed things up. Rather than the usual RAT pedals, he leaned on the Electronic Audio Experiments 0xEAE Boost, which he describes as the most “extreme” dirt pedal he’s used to date. “That pedal is absolutely brutal,” he says with a smile. For the record’s violent feedback, Bentham and Soliveri borrowed one of producer John Goodmanson’s tricks: Split the guitar signal via an A/B box, send one signal to the amp being tracked in an isolation room, and another to a 5-watt amp in the control room. The feedback generated from the small combo jumps back through the pickups, and out to the stack in the isolation room (a Vox AC4 helped out for those purposes). For clean tones, meanwhile, Bentham called on his godfather’s 1952 Les Paul goldtop and a Shyboy Telecaster copy, both running into an Ampeg VT-22. The Ampeg’s reverb, along with the onboard effect from a Fender Deluxe Reverb, is the only coloring Bentham applied besides his dirt.
“There are so many distractions and complications as you navigate a career in music, but you must return to the simple joy of a howlingly distorted Les Paul Custom E chord as your guiding light.”
The RAT, by the way, is still Bentham’s one true love in live settings. “I’ve learned not to mess with my rig, which has served me very well for basically 12 years now,” he says. “It’s never ceased to put a smile on my face to plug into my plexi with my Custom, turn it up, and play an E chord. If that doesn’t make me happy, then I’m probably done with rock ’n’ roll, because that’s what this whole thing is. There are so many distractions and complications as you navigate a career in music, but you must return to the simple joy of a howlingly distorted Les Paul Custom E chord as your guiding light.”
YouTube
On his long-running video tutorial series Let ’er Riff, Bentham breaks down the tricks behind the foundation-shaking fury of The Lash’s opening track, “Gallop of the Hounds.
IK Multimedia releases the Brown Sound 80/81 Signature Collection for TONEX, the second part of the limited TONEX Brown Sound series. Carefully crafted to match the recorded tones of two iconic early-'80s albums, this collection features 73 precisely designed Tone Models, along with several amp-only captures that can be used with IK or 3rd-party IRs or run through a real cab live on stage.
Offering both authentic recreations and thoughtful variations to reflect different theories about how these legendary tracks were recorded, the new Brown Sound collection captures the darker swagger and heavier edge that marked a milestone in the guitarist's journey.
1980 Tone Models
On the 1980 album, the tones are thicker, drier, and more saturated than on the second album, marking a return to a raw, aggressive sound that echoes the ferocity of the debut. It's more in-your-face with a noticeable midrange punch, tighter low end, and more focused articulation. It reflects a shift toward a more modern, high-gain tone, hinting at the sonic direction that would influence the next generation of rock and metal players.
1981 Tone Models Compared to the raw brightness of 78/79, the 1981 tone is tighter and more controlled, with pronounced low-mids and a more percussive attack. There's less of the spacious, open-air feel of the earlier records, replaced by a thick, almost claustrophobic intensity that matches the album's darker vibe. The gain is higher, the reverb is dialed back, and the overall sound feels more focused, brooding, and polished, yet still unmistakable.
The Amp: "The ONE" At the heart of the Brown Sound 80/81 collection is "The ONE" - a meticulously crafted Marshall-style amp built from the ground up with the exact same spec as the infamous 1968 Super Lead serial number #12301, including crucial mods that capture the DNA of the early brown sound like no other amp model.
Ready to Play As with all collections in the series, these Tone Models were crafted using period-correct gear and capture techniques to recreate the middle two albums of that era genuinely. Each Tone Model reproduces the recorded album tone in exquisite detail, offering an ideal foundation for adding time-based effects-either within TONEX or through a favorite pedal.
Pricing and Availability The Brown Sound 78/79 Signature Collection is now available via ToneNET and within any version of TONEX for Mac/PC at $/€99.99.*
TONEX Brown Sound 82/84 – $/€79.99 pre-order (reg. $/€99.99) – Includes 77 Tone Models. Coming soon.
TONEX ONE Brown Sound Limited Edition – $/€249.99 – Available in white, red, or yellow. Includes Brown Sound 78/79 and a choice of one other Brown Sound collection (a $/€199.98 software value). Existing Brown Sound 78/79 users will receive a $/€50 discount at the IK store.
TONEX Brown Sound Anthology Collector's Limited Edition – $/€599.99 – Box set includes all three colors of TONEX ONE (white, red, and yellow) plus all three Brown Sound Signature Collections (78/79, 80/81, and 82/84). Limited to 200 units worldwide. Shipping soon.
*Pricing excluding taxes.
For complete details and information about the Brown Sound Anthology collections and pedals, and to hear the tones, visit: www.ikmultimedia.com/tonex-brown-sound
