
Adding to the Verdugo line, Nu-X launches the Ace of Tone, a dual overdrive pedal stacked with Tubeman MKII and Morning Star.
In the left corner - Tubeman (with FAT mode): Tubeman offers more clarity and gain than a classic Tubescreamer, and Nu-X modified the circuit with a useful secondary function by simply holding the foot switch - FAT mode. Designed for cranked bass response to enhance the low-end.
In the right corner - Morning Star (with SHINE mode): Morning Star is based on the legendary Bluesbreaker circuit: transparent, low gain drive. Like NUXās Morning Star pedal, it also features a simple foot switch hold to engage the iconic SHINE mode. SHINE mode offers more treble sound to create clear tone.
Use the Routing Toggle Switch to adjust the order from Morning Star to Tubeman or Tubeman to Morning Star. This option offers the option to stack the sound. Also, you can toggle BF/TB Switch for Buffer-Bypass or True-Bypass, and 9V/18V Switch to 18V for internal double voltage for wider dynamic range.
Features
- 2 classic overdrive circuits in one compact enclosure.
- Variety of modes and routing design to enhance tone options.
Nu-X Ace Of Tone dual overdrive pedal test by Jimmy Lin
Nu-X Ace of Tone is available now and carries a street price of $119. For more info, please visit: https://www.nuxefx.com.
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Fender Honors Legendary Mike Campbell with Stories Collection āRed Dogā Telecaster
Fender introduces the Stories Collection Mike Campbell Red Dog Telecaster, paying tribute to the iconic guitarist's heavily modified instrument. Featuring two signature humbuckers, a custom single coil bridge pickup, Bigsby tremolo, and a unique "Destruct" circuit, this Telecaster allows players to channel Campbell's legendary tone and style.
Today, Fender Musical Instruments Corporation (FMIC) and the Fender Custom Shop (FCS) introduce the newest member of the āStories Collectionā familyāa series of instruments that pays tribute to iconic Fender guitars and basses that have been uniquely modified by the legendary artists who played them. Mike Campbell, the tasteful and versatile player who is responsible for some of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakersā most memorable riffs, has teamed up with Fender and the Custom Shop to develop the Stories Collection Mike Campbell signature guitars - the Red Dog Telecaster and FCS Limited Edition Masterbuilt 1972 āRed Dogā Telecasterātwo reproductions of Campbellās stunning and heavily modified Telecaster that gives players the opportunity to create their own sonic identity through the framework of one of rock and popās greatest guitar players.
āTelecasters are the heart and soul of rock and roll music and this one is a beautiful instrument,ā said Mike Campbell. āI could tell The Red Dog was special as soon as I picked it up. It felt like it was in the right place at just the right time. The humbuckers give it so much power and such a wide variety of tones while the destruct button really sets it apart from just about any other tele.ā
The tale of the Red Dog Telecaster began when one of Campbellās former students living in Florida offered to sell him a guitar. However, after seeing the guitar in question, it became clear that this was no standard instrument pulled from the rack. Campbell was presented with a bright red Tele equipped with humbuckers in the neck and middle position, a Bigsby tremolo and, perhaps the guitarās most idiosyncratic flourish, an onboard electronic boost dubbed the ādestructā circuit. As any other lifelong guitar devotee would, Campbell bought this glorious Frankenstein of an instrument without a momentās hesitation. The Red Dog was subsequently used most memorably on the Heartbreakerās track āRefugeeā and is prominently featured in the songās music video. All throughout his storied career playing with Tom Petty, as a session guitarist, alongside Fleetwood Mac and touring the world with his solo act The Dirty Knobs, this singular Telecaster has been inextricably linked to Campbellās career and legacy as one of rock and rollās finest players.
The Stories Collection Mike Campbell Red Dog Telecaster offers the same level of craftsmanship and sonic capability at a more accessible price point. The two signature Mike Campbell humbuckers in the neck and middle position bring a low-end growl and high octane output that sets it apart from other Telecaster guitars. However, the custom single coil bridge pickup delivers the caliber of twang that people worldwide associate exclusively with Tele guitars. A Bigsby B5F tremolo allows players to extenuate riffs and solos with an additional level of flourish and attitude. Perhaps the Red Dogās most exciting feature lies beneath the surfaceāthe āDestructā circuit. With the push of a sleek silver button on the control plate, an added 34 dB of gain can be activated for complete tonal dominance.
āItās our mission to honor the legacy and sonic character that Mike Campbell has infused into every note played on his beloved āRed Dogā TelecasterĀ®,ā said Justin Norvell, Executive Vice President of Fender Products. āEvery scratch, modification, and battle scar tells a story, and with these meticulously crafted recreations, weāre giving players everywhere the chance to channel that same timeless energy and write their own musical history.ā
While the Red Dog Telecaster came into his hands already modified, its custom features were universal and powerful enough to elevate Campbellās personal playing style and the same can be said for Fenderās painstakingly detailed and powerfully crafted recreations. The FCS Limited Edition Masterbuilt 1972 āRed Dogā Telecaster is a jaw dropping representation of the instrument as it exists todayādings, paint chips, dents and all by FCSās Senior Masterbuilder Dennis Galuska. Outfitted with vintage replica Arcane, Inc. pickups and signature āDestructā boost circuit wired by Analogman, this custom Telecaster can achieve the same biting jangle heard on āRefugee.ā Features include a flat sawn maple neck with custom Oval āCā back shape, 7.25ā radius fingerboard, 21 vintage upgrade frets, 5-way pickup sector and vintage style Jazzmaster bridge with threaded saddles.
āThe āRed Dogā TelecasterĀ® is a testament to how a heavily modified instrument can be both deeply personal and universally cherished,ā said Chase Paul, Director of Product Development - Fender Custom Shop. āThereās an undeniable magic in an instrument that evolves alongside its player, and every modification on this guitar serves a purpose, working together to create something greater than the sum of its parts. Dennis Galuszka and the Custom Shop dedicated countless hours to faithfully recreating every detail, bringing players and fans as close to Mikeās legendary TeleĀ® as possible.ā
Stories Collection Mike Campbell Red Dog Telecaster® ($3,499.99) Revered for his tasty rhythms and fiery leads, Mike Campbell is responsible for many of the iconic hooks from the Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers catalog. For decades now his faithful Fender guitars have been at the heart of his trusted formula for award-winning tone.Campbell bought what became known as the āRed Dogā from a former guitar student in Florida, complete with Bigsby tremolo and a powerful onboard boost, known as the āDestructā circuit. Mikeās iconic 1972 Red Dog Telecaster is featured on the Damn the Torpedoes track āRefugeeā and can be seen in the accompanying music video. The Stories Collection Mike Campbell āRed Dogā Telecaster features an Heirloom⢠nitrocellulose lacquer āRed Dog Redā finish, 1-piece maple neck with 7.25ā radius fingerboard and 21 vintage-style frets as well as an onboard āDestructā boost circuit. The custom Mike Campbell Red Dog pickup set features two vintage-style humbuckers and a single-coil Telecaster bridge pickup, Bigsby B5F tremolo and a custom Red Dog neck plate. Custom accessories include a vintage-style case, strap, picks and certificate of authenticity.
Unique, versatile and utterly original, The Mike Campbell āRed Dogā Telecaster pays tribute to a veteran Heartbreaker with a serious knack for writing extraordinary songs and delivering catchy, captivating and magnificent guitar parts.
Fender Custom Shop Limited Edition Masterbuilt Mike Campbell 1972 āRed Dogā TelecasterĀ® ($20,000.00) With raw, powerful riffs and explosive leads, Mike Campbell firmly established himself as one of the greatest guitarists and songwriters in music historyāand throughout his accomplished career, Fender guitars played in integral role in his creative expression. One of his most noteworthy instruments was his modified three-pickup Telecaster that would come to be known as the āRed Dog.ā Fender Custom Shop Senior Masterbuilder Dennis Galuszka partnered with Mike to recreate this incredible guitar. From beautifully faded red metallic finish to the worn and Bigsby B5 vibrato tailpiece, every nick, ding and scratch was meticulously replicated to bring this tribute guitar to life. Loaded with vintage replica Arcane, Inc. pickups and a āDestructā boost circuit wired by Analogman, this Tele plays, sounds and feels just like the guitar heard on āRefugee.ā Its two-piece select alder body and custom-shaped, one-piece maple neck feature a well-loved RelicĀ® lacquer finish, while the hardware is aged to look like itās been played for the last five decades. Wonderfully unique and with a storied past, the Limited Edition Masterbuilt Mike Campbell 1972 āRed Dogā Telecaster is a fitting homage to such an incredibly captivating and inspiring musician. Other premium features include flat sawn maple neck with custom Oval āCā back-shape, 7.25ā (184.1 mm) radius, 21 vintage upgrade (45085) frets, 5-way switch, 3-ply parchment pickguard, vintage-style JazzmasterĀ® bridge with threaded steel saddles, vintage-style āFā-stamped tuning machines, bone nut, two American Vintage ā65+ string trees with nylon spacers, deluxe hardshell case, strap and certificate of authenticity.
For more information, please visit fender.com.
Fender Stories Collection Mike Campbell Red Dog Telecaster Electric Guitar - Red Dog Red
Stories Collection Mike Campbell Red Dog Tele, MapExpansive range of subtle thickening and focusing tones to fuzz. Great alternative to run-of-the-mill overdrive and fuzz. Enables surgical shaping of guitar sounds within a mix.
Interactive, sometimes sensitive controls make certain tones elusive and lend the pedal a twitchy feel.
$179
Catalinbread Airstrip
With the preamp from a Trident A-Range console as their target, Catalinbread conjures up a varied gain device that can massage or mangle your guitar tone.
Replicating a recording console preamp in a pedal is a pretty elementary idea, but itās inspired stompboxes as varied as theJHS Colour Box andHudson Broadcast. All recording desksāand the pedals that imitate themāhave their own color. Catalinbreadās Airstrip chases the sound of a Trident A-Range channel strip. (Search āTrident Studiosā to get a handle on the kind of clientele the place attracted back in the ā60s and ā70s).
Presently, a new Trident A-Range channel strip costs thousands of dollars. An original? Well, only 13 desks were made, so you can probably get a nice used Rolls Royce for lessāif you can find one. Rightly then, one should temper expectations about how well a $179 pedal can ape a priceless console. But like many preamps in a box, the Airstrip excels at a wide range of gain-shaping tasks, from surgical boost and EQ shadings to fuzzy, filtered, ready-to-rip-through-a-mix Jimmy Page/Beatles/Neil Young-style direct-to-desk tones. Even at extremes, the Airstrip is sensitive to touch, volume, and tone dynamics, enabling pivots from light (if very focused) overdrive to ā60s germanium-fuzz-like sounds with changes in guitar volume and tone. And though itās dynamic and responsive, at many settings it also exhibits lovely compression tendencies, softening transients before giving way to wide-vista tone bloomsāa great recipe for spare, lyrical, melodic leads with a ā60s biker-flick-soundtrack edge. Without any of its market-leading competitors around for comparison, itās hard to say exactly how the Airstrip aligns with their EQ biases and core tones. What is certain is that there are scores of mellow to unconventionally aggressive colors here to explore.
AI, which generated this image in seconds, can obviously do amazing things. But can it actually replace human creativity?
Technology has always disrupted the music biz, but weāve never seen anything like this.
AI has me deeply thinking: Is guitar (or any instrument) still valid? Are musicians still valid? I donāt think the answer is as obvious as Iād like it to be.
As a professional musician, Iāve spent the vast majority of my days immersed in the tones of tube amps, the resistance of steel strings under my fingers, and the endless pursuit of musical expression. Each day, I strive to tap into the Source, channel something new into the world (however small), and share it. Yet, lately, a new presence has entered the roomāartificial intelligence. It is an interloper unlike any Iāve ever encountered. If youāre thinking that AI is something off in the ānot-too-distant future,ā youāre exponentially wrong. So, this month Iām going to ask that we sit and meditate on this technology, and hopefully gain some insight into how we are just beginning to use it.
AI: Friend or Foe?
In the last 12 months, Iāve heard quite a bit of AI-generated music. Algorithms can now ācompose,ā āperformā (with vocals of your choosing), and āproduceā entire songs in minutes, with prompts as flippant as, āWrite a song about__in the style of__.ā AI never misses a note and can mimic the finer details of almost any genre with unnerving precision. For those who are merely curious about music, or those easily distracted by novelty, this might seem exciting ⦠a shortcut to creating āprofessionalā sounding music without years of practice. But for those of us who are deeply passionate about music, it raises some profound existential questions.
When you play an instrument, you engage in something deeply human. Each musician carries their life experiences into their playing. The pain of heartbreak, the joy of new beginnings, or the struggle to find a voice in an increasingly noisy and artificial online world dominated by algorithms. Sweat, tears, and callouses develop from your efforts and repetition. Your mistakes can lead to new creative vistas and shape the evolution of your style.
Emotions shape the music we create. While an algorithm can only infer and assign a āvalueā to the vast variety of our experience, it is ruthlessly proficient at analyzing and recording the entire corpus of human existence, and further, cataloging every known human behavioral action and response in mere fractions of a second.
Pardon the Disruption
Technology has always disrupted the music industry. The invention of musical notation provided unprecedented access to compositions. The advent of records allowed performances of music to be captured and shared. When radio brought music into every home, there was fear that no one would buy records. Television added visual spectacle, sparking fears that it would kill live performance. MIDI revolutionized music production but raised concerns about replacing human players. The internet, paired with the MP3 format, democratized music distribution, shattered traditional revenue models, and shifted power from labels to artists. Each of these innovations was met with resistance and uncertainty, but ultimately, they expanded the ways music could be created, shared, and experienced.
Every revolution in art and technology forces us to rediscover what is uniquely human about creativity. To me, though, this is different. AI isnāt a tool that requires a significant amount of human input in order to work. Itās already analyzed the minutia of all of humanityās greatest creationsāfrom the most esoteric to the ubiquitous, and it is wholly capable of creating entire works of art that are as commercially competitive as anything youāve ever heard. This will force us to recalibrate our definition of art and push us to dig deeper into our personal truths.
āIn an age where performed perfection is casually synthesized into existence, does our human expression still hold value? Especially if the average listener canāt tell the difference?ā
Advantage: Humans
What if we donāt want to, though? In an age where performed perfection is casually synthesized into existence, does our human expression still hold value? Especially if the average listener canāt tell the difference?
Of course, the answer is still emphatically āYes!ā But caveat emptor. I believe that the value of the tool depends entirely on the way in which it is usedāand this one in particular is a very, very powerful tool. We all need to read the manual and handle with care.
AI cannot replicate the experience of creating music in the moment. It cannot capture the energy of a living room jam session with friends or the adrenaline of playing a less-than-perfect set in front of a crowd who cheers because they feel your passion. It cannot replace the personal journey you take each time you push through frustration to master a riff that once seemed impossible. So, my fellow musicians, I say this: Your music is valid. Your guitar is valid. What you create with your hands and heart will always stand apart from what an algorithm can generate.
Our audience, on the other hand, is quite a different matter. And thatās the subject for next monthās Dojo. Until then, namaste.
Genuine, dynamic Vox sound and feel. Plenty of different tone-sweetening applications. Receives other pedals as nicely as a real amp.
Can get icy quick. Preamp tube presents risk for damage.
$299
Tubesteader Roy
tubesteader.com
The Roy is an exceedingly faithful Vox box that brings genuine tube dynamics to your pedalboard.
This is an interesting moment for amp-in-a-box pedals. It used to be novel to have a little box that approximated the tone signature of an iconic amp. Nowadays, though, modeling pedals and profilers can give you many digital emulations in one package. Nevertheless, there are still worlds of possibility in pedals that copy amp topology in discrete formāparticularly when you add a real preamp tube to that mix.
Thatās what Montreal builder Tubesteader did with the Roy, their entry in the Vox-Top-Boost-AC30-in-a-box race. The Roy is a 2-channel preamp and overdrive built around a 12AX7 vacuum tubeāa design gambit that is relatively uncommon if not totally unique. The tube makes the Roy look much more vintage in spirit at a time when sleek, black Helixes and Fractals are overtaking stages. In some ways, it looks like an antique. It can sound like one in the best way too.
Riding the Tube
āThe Roy comes in a handsome brownish-red enclosure, with an unsurprising control layout. The rightmost footswitch turns the pedal on and off, and the one at left switches between the identical channels. Each channel has an output volume and gain knob; the controls on the right are assigned to the default channel, and when you tap the left footswitch, you engage the left-side control tandem. The treble and bass controls between the two volume and gain knobs are shared by the two channels, but a post-EQ master tone cut control, which rolls off additional treble frequencies, is mounted on the crown of the pedal beside the power input. The input and output jacks occupy the left and right sides, along with a 3.5 mm jack for external operation. The Roy runs at 12 volts and draws 350 mA, and the included power supply can be reconfigured easily for a range of international outlets.
Tubesteaderās literature says the pedalās tones are generated via a high-voltage transistor in the first gain stage coupled with the 12AX7, which operates at 260 volts. That preamp tube is nested at the top of the enclosureās face, underneath a protective metal āroll barā. Trusty as it looks, when there is a glass element on the exterior of a pedalās housing, thereās an element of vulnerability, and transporting and using the Roy probably requires a more conscientious approach than a standard stompbox.
Royal Tones
Compared to the Vox's own Mystic Edge, an AC30-in-a-box from Vox powered by Korgās NuTube vacuum fluorescent display technology, the Roy feels warmer, and more dynamic, proving that the 12AX7 isnāt just there for looks. The Mystic Edge could sound positively icy compared to the Royās smooth, even breakup. The Roy is very happy at aggressive settings, and in my estimation, it sounds best with output volumes driving an amp hard and the pedalās gain around 3 oāclock. That recipe sounds good with single-coil guitars, but with a P-90-loaded Les Paul Junior, it achieves roaring classic-rock greatness. Iāve always felt Voxes, rather than Marshalls, are better vehicles for dirty punk chording. The Roy did nothing to dissuade me from that belief. And the pedals' midrange punch and bark in power-chord contexts lent authority and balance that makes such chords hit extra hard.
Though the Roy creates many of its own tasty drive tones, it really comes to life when pushed by a boost or overdrive, much like a real amp. When I punched it with a Fish Circuits Model One overdrive, the Roy was smoother and less spiky than a cranked AC30, yet there was plenty of note definition, attack, and the harmonic riches youād turn to an AC for in the first place. A JFET SuperCool Caffeine Boost also brought additional depth and color to the output and broadened the pedalās voice.
If youāre most comfortable with a real Vox amp, the Roy is a reliable and familiar-feeling stand-in when managing a different backline amp. In at least one way, though, the Roy is, perhaps, a bit toofaithful to its influenceās design: Thereās a lot of treble on tap, and itās easy to cook up tinnitus-inducing frequencies if you get too aggressive with the treble control. Noon positions on the cut/boost tone knobs sound pretty neutral. But I found it difficult to push the treble much past 2 oāclock without wincingāeven with the tone cut control set at its darkest. (This quality, of course, may make the Roy a good match for squishier Fender-style designs). The relationship between the Royās treble and bass controls also takes time to master. The two donāt just add or boost their respective frequencies, but also add or subtract midrange, which can result in intense and sudden gain-response changes. As a general guideline, a light touch goes a long way when fine tuning these frequencies.The Verdict
The Roy isnāt exactly a bargain at $299. Then again, this Vox-in-a-box can stand in for real-deal Top Boost tones and the 2-channel design means you can move between an ACās chimey cleans and ripping cranked sounds in a flash. If youāre squarely in the Vox amp camp, youād be hard-pressed to find a more authentic means of achieving that range of clean-to-crunchy sounds.