Forget space-cadet sounds. This road-tough envelope filter is all about dialing fat funkiness with minimal hassle.
Recorded direct into Avid Mbox into Logic X using Sandberg T5..
Clip 1 - Low filter engaged
Clip 2 - High filter engaged.
Clip 3 - Both filters engaged.
RatingsPros:Excellent build. Simple design. Practical sounds. Cons: No blend control. Big footprint. Street: $299 Ashdown Type 23 ashdownmusic.com | Tones:  Ease of Use:  Build/Design:  Value: |
Over the last 20 years or so, Ashdown has carved out a nice niche in the bass universe with amps that have become fast favorites with some pretty high-profile rock bassists. When first introduced, the company’s ABM amplifier series proved Ashdown had the skill and R&D to create products that sounded like nothing else on the market at the time. Knowing what the company has been and continues to be capable of, I was excited to check out a recent addition to Ashdown’s ever-growing pedal line: a new envelope filter called the Type 23.
Brick House
There’s no getting around it: This pedal is heavy and big. Even more striking, initially, is that the only things on the almost 1 1/2-pound pedal’s face are a knob, a toggle, and a footswitch. The vintage nerd in me nodded and smiled while feeling the pedal’s weight and gazing at its simplicity.
The 3-position rocker switch selects the filter frequency: high, low, or a mix of both. The rotary control manages the filter’s sensitivity. There’s also a switch on the bottom of the pedal that lets you further tailor the chosen filter-oscillation frequency. With just a few options to manipulate the tone, however, one can’t help but be curious how many varieties of funk the pedal is actually capable of putting out.
From Swish to Swosh
What was evident after only 30 seconds of playing is that the Type 23 has no intention of being a traditional envelope filter. When the sensitivity is set all the way down, a typical filter pedal only lets a sub signal through—barelyenough to discern any kind of pitch. The Type 23 is not like that. Not at all. Instead, it has a very midrange-forward, nasal-y-ish personality across all the settings, which allows the pedal to stand its own sonic ground, even with numerous other instruments surrounding it.
With the filter frequency switch on the low setting and the sensitivity control at noon, the filter produces a clear, punchy tone with strong fundamentals from the still-present clean tone. The most prevalent sound is a loud swishthat surrounds the note and lands like a small, high-pitched UFO after cutting the note off. If you want less of it, simply dial the sensitivity back to 9 o’clock, where a very vocal, almost talk-box-like tone occurs.
Setting the frequency switch to high and returning the sensitivity control to noon, a lower-voiced tone makes an entrance, with an extra-aggressive midrange normally only achievable through use of distortion.
The pedal does a great job of maintaining fundamental lows when engaged, and I found that the middle position (when used with a direct signal on a separate channel) provides a subtle but perfect amount of funkiness to sit comfortably with other instruments in the mix for an entire song—not just as an effect to turn on, say, for a solo. This gives it tremendous potential as a tool in the studio.
The Verdict
Instead of an envelope filter with a ton of spaced-out-sounding effects one may never use, Ashdown’s Type 23 presents us with a few very usable ones. The extremely simple layout makes for lightning-fast tweakability, and the old-school solidity in the build department makes for a good, modern replacement for those of us who have had to rely on more fragile vintage filters on tour. If you’re willing to sacrifice a chunk of pedalboard real estate, the Type 23 is a strong candidate for a funky new occupant.
A wildly varied modulation machine delivers familiar to far-out tone colors at a rock-bottom price.
Recorded using a Gibson SG, Fender Stratocaster and Orange TH-30. Miked with a Shure SM-57 and Apogee Duet into Logic.
Clip 1: Gibson SG with Auto Wah, Ring Mod, and Octave effects
Clip 2: Stratocaster with Flange and Chorus
RatingsPros:Very inexpensive unit with a huge selection of effects. Tap tempo for both channels. Cons: Dialing in some tones on the fly can be complex. Some discernable digital artifacts. Street: $90 Joyo Vision Dual-Modulation joyoaudio.com | Tones: Ease of Use: Build/Design: Value:  |
Joyo Audio are known for their inexpensive effects, and their product catalog is overflowing with affordable alternatives to classic and newfangled stompboxes. Impressively, many of these offerings are fairly comprehensive multi-effects. The new Vision is one of them, and it’s a treasure trove of tremolo, chorus, flange, and phase, and more radical modulation machines.
Double Vision
The Vision’s most prominent feature is a dual-footswitch design that enables parallel or in-series use of any two effects. But the meat of the matter is the 18 effects themselves, which can be used in isolation or in tandem. Many of these are variations on a theme: There are standard chorus, tri chorus, and “small” choruses, for instance, as well as multiple phasers and flangers. But there are also ring modulators, vibrato, and a few tremoloes in the mix. The effects are divided into two groups called “Mode A” and “Mode B.” Each effect group has a 9-point rotary switch, dedicated depth/mix knobs, as well as separate speed/rate and control parameters. Each effect also has a “control” knob that changes function depending on the effect. The center-mounted toggle enables you to switch between series or parallel output, allowing you to cascade Mode A into Mode B, or hear the two modes combined at the output. And as you might have imagined by now, there’s a lot of ways to modify the basic tones from any one of Vision’s effects.
Both footswitches can function as a tap tempo switch for their respective modes, which you activate by holding down the switch and then tapping the desired tempo. On the crown, there are stereo inputs and outputs. Cool blue ambient lighting can be turned on, off, or set to synch with the modulations with a switch located on the backplate. The unit can only be powered with a 9V barrel adaptor, and there is no battery option.
Blurring the Lines
Most of the standard effects housed in the Vision do a great job covering the basics. A quick run through the chorus settings, for instance, made it easy to find a very good approximation of the opening/verse warble in Nirvana’s “Come As You Are.” In this setting, the control knob adjusted the top-end flutter and shimmer in the chorus. And, in fact, the control function works in similar fashion for many of the effects—adding presence and resonance to modulations to highlight them in a mix. Intensity can vary, however. On the auto wah, for example, adjustments to the control knob determine whether you get more of an “ooh” or “ahh” effect. On the low-bit effect, control seemed to alter the output very little.
Less orthodox effects like the low-bit setting produce synthetic delights that sound a bit like a harpsichord patch on an old Casio synth and can be mangled into 8-bit Nintendo glitchiness with alterations to rate and depth and guitar tone. Route the low-bit effect into the ring modulator and you get eerie, low-fi, and paranoid textures fit for a Twilight Zone score. You can dial in these compound effects settings to a point where guitar tone is all but indiscernible—especially with the depth/mix controls maxed out. Even at these settings, though, there’s still room to dial in more clarity or chaos with the series/parallel option.
The Verdict
The Vision delivers an impressive range of modulation tools and voices ranging from familiar to far-out. The many tone tailoring options and tap tempo options make the unit even more impressive for the price, which, arguably, would be a deal with half of these features. Some players will probably long for the ability to create presets, given how many possible textures are on tap. But, at $90, it’s hard to imagine a way to get more modulation for the buck.
Flexible bias and gain controls extend the Maestro FZ-1 voice to awesomely utilitarian ends.
RatingsPros:Awesomely enhanced, extended, and expanded variations on Maestro FZ-1 tones. Very cool clean-to-low-gain capabilities. Cons: Higher-gain tones may be off-putting for vintage purists. Street: $209 Crazy Tube Limelight crazytubecircuits.com
| Tones: Ease of Use: Build/Design: Value: |
If I was a betting fella, I’d wager that the twenty-teens will be remembered as a platinum-gilded age of fuzz. It’s been fun to watch and listen as boutique builders and garage-soldering-loner maniacs have resurrected every last weirdo ’60s scuzz machine with the vigor of mad scientists bringing dinosaurs back to life from amber. But as I test the made-in-Greece Crazy Tubes Circuits Limelight fuzz, I’m compelled to ask: Is it me, or does it seem like the mother of all fuzzes, the Maestro FZ-1 Fuzz-Tone gets sorta lost in the mad rush?
I know there are a number of great clones and derivatives out there, including scads of home-builds based on its very simple germanium three-transistor circuit. But it’s easily the classic circuit I’ve interacted with the least over the last 10 years. Now that I’ve spent quality time with the FZ-1-inspired Limelight, my interest is pretty ragingly piqued. And while I’m sure more concerted exploration of the Maestro Fuzz-Tone’s offspring will reveal many gems, it’s hard to imagine a more versatile branch on the FZ-1 family tree than this one.
Evolutionary Arcs
Crazy Tubes says the Limelight isn’t an FZ-1 clone. And with the circuit board inverted, it’s hard to say how close or distant the design is. What I can say with certainty is that Crazy Tubes has managed to capture the honking voice of an FZ-1, give it more body and gain, extend its range in low gain settings, and provide the means to strip back the enhancements and tap into the FZ-1’s more feral and ragged essence. At both ends of its performance envelope, it’s a joy to work with. And if it isn’t an FZ-1 down to the letter, it’s certainly an exponentially more useful pedal.
Because it’s a ’60s-inspired fuzz, the Limelight’s controls are silly simple. But they’re also deceptively simple when you consider the range of sounds you can extract from them. The volume and gain controls mimic what you’d see on a vintage Maestro, or an early Tone Bender or Fuzz Face, for that matter. But the gain control has way more gain and range here, and though it retains much of the fizz and buzz of an FZ-1, progressively hotter gain levels yield more muscular versions of that voice and much more sustain than an FZ-1 can generate.
The Limelight also differs from vintage fuzzes in its ability to conjure near-clean tones at the most subdued end of its range. On most such specimens, low-gain settings result in thin, sputtering, and generally joyless and monochromatic tones. But when you use high volume settings and the lowest possible gain settings, the pedal takes on the qualities of a growly germanium overdrive. Better still, the pedal remains responsive to guitar tone and volume attenuation at these settings, and you can generate lively, clean, and jangly tones with just a touch of guitar volume reduction.
The other real difference-maker in the Limelight is the beam control: a bias control that starves the circuit of voltage at counter clockwise settings and juices the works at the other end. The beam knob is the key to unleashing the most savage side of the Limelight. But it also enables you to rein in the gain and explore the colors of the more humble, original, 3-volt, AA-battery powered Maestro FZ-1. These tones probably won’t find tons of fans among fuzz freaks predisposed toward modern, full-frequency, high-gain fuzz. But they are brimming with character. And if they don’t always work for full-throttle live applications, the recording possibilities are thrilling. I loved doubling looped rhythm parts with high-gain and near-clean tones, and peppering a loop with dusty, crumbling low-voltage lead lines. And the process really underscored the fantastic range in the Limelight.
The Verdict
If, like me, you’ve neglected the possibilities of the Maestro FZ-1 tone palette, the Limelight is a superb point from which you can launch your explorations. Vintage purists will probably argue that the Limelight circuit deviates too radically from the original. But for me, that assessment misses the point. Limelight takes some of the very best attributes of the FZ-1—particularly it’s honking, splattery and fractured voice—to more aggressive and restrained places than the FZ-1 ever could. And if the Limelight is a bit dear, the breadth of its voices make it a very fair deal.