Introduction
Bluewhale pedals hail from Bude, Cornwall, UK, owned and run by Rob.
Bluewhale make handcrafted pedals from start to finish – In-house printing, drilling, soldering the circuit board, assembly and then wired by hand.
Rob is building one run of pedals each month, the latest ones are the Fuzzbenders available direct from Bluewhale’s website, typically priced at £149.
You can follow Bluewhale on Instagram where Rob documents pedal builds and even runs a monthly giveaway.
3 Flavours of Fuzz
There are 3 Fuzzbender pedals, each with their own distinctive colour and sound.
Fuzzbender
This pedal is based on the famous mk1.5 Tonebender, modernised for compatibility with today’s pedals and has a power filter and is reverse polarity protected. It has an aluminium diecast enclosure finished in an attractive metallic powder coat finish.
Voxbender
The Voxbender is Bluewhale’s version of the Vox Tonebender, imagine Mk1.5 Tonebender crossed with a Rangemaster. It’s not an accurate clone and isn’t meant to be, it is modified in various ways to turn it into a practical pedal that’s totally at home on a modern pedal board.
FuzzbenderFF
The Fuzzbender FF is a Fuzz Face clone, capturing that distinctive classic tone perfectly, in the Q1 position there is a germanium transistor to provide that fat tone and in Q2 a silicon transistor ensures stability under various operating conditions.
Sound Demos
Conclusions
I haven’t tried these pedals myself but the sound quality on the demo videos is excellent and the build quality looks impressive too. The Voxbender seems to have more top end, the Fuzzbender FF sounds like it gets the gnarliest. How on earth do you choose between them?
I’m sure you’ve noticed there’s a different guitar in each of the videos, however, there are more videos using the same setup so you can compare and contrast the pedals.
I’d definitely recommend checking out Bluewhale’s website for more great pedals.
Coming next, the Klonos….
