Deep Trip Hellbender

Submitted on January 7, 2009

In the end of the 60s, after being introduced to the Fuzz Face, guitarists encountered a yet more furious, untamed and simply wonderful distortion: the Coloursond Tonebender mk2. Our good people at DeepTrip felt the urge to revisit this pedal in all it's versions and configurations, and created something even more extreme.

The most high gain pedal of our line, no doubt about it, this fat and compressed distortion can sustain notes and feedback for days. The best pedal to play Stoner and 70's hard rock stuff, recreating sounds that can be heard in records such as Grand Funk, Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Jeff Beck and Randy Rhoads, and also more modern artists like the Smashing Pumpkins, Queens of the Stone Age and White Stripes.

The Fuzz knob adds gain and saturation to the sound, so on minimum settings the Hellbender resembles a very dirty overdrive, and when dimed there is a ridiculous amount of filth and gain.

The Mood knob works as an external bias control for one of the germanium transistors. Around noon the knob sets a regular operation voltage of 4.5v. Turning it counter-clockwise the power feed is decreased: the volume drops, the sound gets a little bit smoother, a sag effect appears and further down a gated fuzz sound is achieved. Turning the knob clockwise from noon the power feed is increased, the volume turns up, the pick attack is faster and the overall sound is more metallic and aggressive. Therefore the Mood knob allows guitarists to remain in the classic fuzz realm keeping it close to noon, or to explore new interesting territories in the extreme settings!

The Mode toggle throws in a high impedance cell in front of the fuzz circuit making the overall sound more brilliant and well defined, with a fast responding distortion-like dynamic, and allowing wah-wah pedals to work perfectly before the pedal. Does your fuzz wah like this??

You can still filter off bass frequencies and decrease the pedal's overall gain though the three position Voice toggle: treble boost, classic fuzz and extra bass, giving the pedal lots of versatility and matching it with different amps settings. Cutting sounds, well balanced voice or fat dripping fuzz, here you find all that.

To cut short Hellbender is the Tonebender from hell, a little hemi orange machine that produces heavy sounds, old and new, while preserving the tonal characteristics of different guitars and rigs played through.

As all other DeepTrip pedals the Hellbender is true bypass and operates with 9v negative center DC jack that can be shared with most commercial pedals, but if you are the battery type we've included and external battery drawer so you don't need to screw around.