There’s a certain quality about some 60’s and early 70’s guitar tones that seem to be rather exclusive of that psychadelic era. If you hear Mick Ronson on Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust era (live in “Santa Monica ‘72” is great), Pink Floyd at The Piper at the Gates of Dawn or British blues masterpieces by The Yardbirds, Cream, Faces, Stones and so on, those searing and cutting guitar tones sound like they could rip one’s ear apart from his head! The funny thing: they don’t, and they sound great! Remember when some mop-topped kids met Dylan, grass, acid and grew up to change music forever?

From their rubber souls straight to the lonely hearts club, this is it. After all these years, it’s getting hard to hear that kind of tone again. Where is it? Well, now it’s here with all the power you ever wanted.

The Kryptone v3 comes from many years of continuous study and development (since 2007) over a core of first generation Vox Tonebender from mid sixties, a kind of tighter, brighter and more textured fuzz face, one of the classic fuzz pedals that defined rock. But instead of being limited to capturing its beautiful vintage soul (by the study of original units for reference) using modern reliable electronics and none of the problems of its predecessors, it also opens a huge landscape of vibrant fuzzy wonders that go much beyond those vintage fuzzes we love.

Unlike the 1960's fuzz boxes, the Kryptone works with your typical 9V DC power supply as well as with a 9V battery, performs great with a wah-wah, can go anywhere in your signal chain without fighting with buffers or any other pedal and can adapt to any amplifier, vintage or new, without radical performance changes.

CHANGES FROM THE PREVIOUS V2 VERSION

We have developed a completely new input stage that makes the fuzz core circuit behave much more naturally, both in warmth and in dynamics, almost as if it was connected directly to your guitar. Even though you can put this Kryptone v3 anywhere in your chain, the actual fuzz stages don’t see a buffered stage, but rather a high output impedance (closer to a passive guitar) stage that has been developed and balanced specifically for this fuzz circuit to create this organic connection that we cherish so much in our vintage units and replicas. The end result can be heard, but is even clearer when the pedal is played; it’s the kind of thing you can feel in your hands! Other adjectives we heard from the beta testers include “elastic”, “responsive” and, of course, “addictive”. It does feel addictive to play!

On the other hand, the overall frequency response has been expanded, with the harmonics more perfectly tuned for a rich listening experience. It sounds huge and complex in all settings.

Talking about settings, the range of the controls have been enlarged as well. Here, the BIAS control goes deeper in both ends, from extremely gated “low battery” sounds all the way to the very asymmetric wave with quirky textures and messed intervals. Every small turn of the knob is a new trip!

The HIGHS control went through a different treatment: after the more natural input stage and the expanded frequency response, we thought the HIGHS could be upgraded by changing the range of frequencies it adjusts. The new tighter band allows you to use the whole range of the knob to look for different tones that match what you want to hear, without ever sounding dull and lifeless.