Review : BOSS Waza Craft Tone Bender TB-2w
Hey gang! In this short review, I look at a pedal that I bought last year but only unboxed for the first time today. I will warn you up front that these things are scarce, rumour is that only 300 were made and that a lot of them never made it out of Japan. I had ordered two, and was quite surprised to actually receive one as I had been told none would make it to Canada. Nonetheless, it’s here and going back into its box right after this review is done.
It is the BOSS Waza Craft Tone Bender TB-2w that was developed directly with Sola Sound, the makers of the original Tone Bender.
As Tone Bender fans will know, there are multiple versions of the original Tone Bender. The BOSS version is a direct copy of a Tone Bender Mk II serial number 500 from the Sola Sound archive.
About the TB-2w
The unit is a fuzz box. In fact it’s one of the original fuzz boxes and Tone Benders were incredibly popular in the late sixties featuring the Mk I, the 1.5 and the Mark II on which the Boss TB-2w is based.
It has two controls, level and attack and a power level switch on the top deck. On the rear is a power input jack rated at 9v and a switch to select between buffered or pass-through options.
The Level knob controls the level of the output signal. Fully counter-clockwise is off. In my testing, I found that 2 o’clock was unity gain for my setup. The Attack control sets the level of fuzz gain. It does not change the loudness, only the level of the fuzz effect.
The battery switch has options for 7V, 9V and 12V. To be clear, the device takes either a 9V battery or a 9V external power supply. The switch allows the user to hear different tones bases on the switch position, where 7v is the sound of the Tone Bender with a dying battery, 9v is normal and 12v is the sound of super hot batteries. While 9V batteries are very consistent today, that was not always the case in the sixties, as there were more battery formulations and a lot of inconsistency in output. Ask anyone who had a pocket transistor radio back in the sixties if they remember how different batteries made the radios sound different. There is a Check light that comes on when the unit is active and if you are running it on battery, the LED will dim as the battery power wanes.
The on off switch is the classic BOSS design. It just works. Beside the 9V input on the rear, there is a switch to select between pass-through or buffered bypass. The switch is in effect whether the device is active or not.
What’s the Fuzz (Fuss)?
You can still buy new Tone Benders by ordering direct from Macari’s in the UK. Macari’s handles the original Sola Sound and Colorsound products. The Tone Bender available as I write this is the Mk IV which has a tone knob. At 499 English pounds, it’s rather pricey. You can also find Tone Bender kits on the Internet. If you can do basic soldering, a kit is an inexpensive route. I believe that the case was the most expensive part of the original Tone Bender. The electronics are incredibly basic. The BOSS TB-2w was designed with Sola Sound and while the release was very limited, it is widely respected as a completely accurate version of the Tone Bender Mk II although it is viewed as more stable as BOSS was very particular about the grade of the Germanium transistors used to properly match the s/n 500 original Tone Bender Mk II used as the template. You can find TB-2w units on Reverb with pricing running well over one thousand dollars Canadian. That’s the asking price of course, but considering that the unit was sold for under $500 new, these asking prices in my opinion are delusional. Kits such as those found at AionFX are reputed to use quality components and run less than $100.
The Sound
As regular readers know, I am not a big fuzz fan. Goodness knows that I have tried many fuzzes over the years, and only the Wampler Velvet Fuzz and the Effectrode Mercury Fuzz have stayed on boards, and I use them rarely. I have to say that the BOSS TB-2w sounds really good. For a short sample set, I plugged my early Seventies Les Paul with Seymour Duncan Antiquity pickups into the TB-2w and then into my Laney LA-Studio. I took the DI out of the LA-Studio into a Clarett+ 8Pre interface which fed Logic Pro. No effects or eq was done in Logic Pro before bouncing the file down to MP3. There are four short segments. The first is a clean signal. Next is the TB-2w with Attack at the lowest setting, third the Attack knob is moved to noon and finally the Attack knob is cranked all the way up. There is the expected limiting that occurs in the signal, and I think that there is application for any option on the knob. While it can be difficult to hear a big difference, especially with ear buds, there is a difference in the waveforms.
In the waveform, you can see what is happening in each section, clean, lowest attack, middle attack, full attack.
Conclusion
Even though I got the TB-2w when it first released, I had never unboxed it, as I had ordered it when first announced without a specific use case. I decided on a whim to see if it was something that I would use regularly and while it goes on my list of acceptable (to me) fuzzes, the reality is that I still would not use it a lot. I do think that Germanium based fuzzes sound better to me than silicon based fuzzes, but that’s neither here nor there as my go to fuzz, when I go there is actually tube based (Effectrode Mercury). I hope that you found this review of some use. Please leave a comment or send in a question on any guitar topic. Thanks as always. I’m Ross Chevalier and I bid you peace.
