BLAMMO! P2P Tone Bender MKi

The BLAMMO! P2P Tone Bender MKi is a hand-wired, point-to-point fuzz pedal built around the Tone Bender MKi circuit, one of the earliest fuzz designs and a close cousin of the even earlier FZ1a, which BLAMMO! says the circuit is based on¹. The company describes it as "tuned for a slightly gated / raunchy fuzz tone," which places it among the rawer, ruder end of fuzz rather than the smooth, singing end¹. It is built by BLAMMO! Electronics, a small Portland, Oregon fuzz specialist whose range also includes the BLAMMO! Skronk Machine, the BLAMMO! Buzzaround and the BLAMMO! Electronics P2P Buzz Tone.

The build is the selling point as much as the circuit. Instead of a printed circuit board, the components are soldered together point to point, a construction style BLAMMO! says "keeps the signal traces extra short"¹. The transistors are NOS MP38a germanium, hand selected for gain and leakage, and the rest of the parts follow the vintage recipe: carbon composition resistors¹.

The controls: Level and Attack

The MKi keeps the two-knob layout of the original. BLAMMO! describes what each does¹:

The Attack knob is where the personality lives. BLAMMO! describes its range this way: turned left, it yields a "skronky / lightly gated fuzz with early breakup and little sustain," while turned right it produces a "meaty n' raw fuzz with good sustain and mid frequency charector"¹. In practical terms, the knob sweeps from a splatty, cutting fuzz that cleans up and gates at low settings to a thicker, more sustained fuzz with more midrange body at high settings.

Power and connections

Powering the MKi is straightforward and works either way a player is likely to want¹:

• A 9 volt battery snap inside the enclosure, which disconnects automatically when a plug is inserted at the input jack¹
• A 2.1mm center negative DC input, the standard Boss-type connector, so it works with common pedalboard power supplies¹
• Current draw is 3mA, light enough that a battery lasts a long time and daisy chaining is not a heavy load¹

Input and output jacks are both top mounted, which suits tight pedalboards where side jacks would crowd neighboring pedals¹. The enclosure is a copper hammertone 125b box measuring 4.8 x 2.64 x 1.58 inches, a compact footprint¹. Switching is true bypass through a low profile 3PDT footswitch, so the pedal is out of the signal path entirely when disengaged¹.

How it differs from the BLAMMO! MKii

BLAMMO! builds a companion pedal, the P2P Tone Bender MKii, and the two make a useful comparison because they share construction, price and control layout but differ in circuit and voicing².

The MKii's Attack knob behaves differently too: BLAMMO! says that dialed left it gives a "gutteral mid focused bark with no gating," while cranked right it reveals a "sweet, singing fuzz tone with plenty of sustain and upper frequency content"². Where the MKi leans ragged and gated, the MKii leans sustained and vocal. Both are hand-wired point to point with carbon comp resistors, true bypass, the same power arrangements and the same $199.99 list price¹².

Where the circuit came from

The Tone Bender family is one of the founding lines of fuzz. The MKi that this pedal recreates sits at the very start of it, next to the FZ1a, which BLAMMO! names as the circuit it is based on¹. The later MKii version became the famous one: ThroBak describes the "3 germanium Sola Sound Tone Bender MKii Professional" as having been used by Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck³. The line kept evolving after that; the independent fuzz history site Fuzzboxes.org notes that "the demise of the MKII resulted in Sola Sound's invention of the Vox Tone Bender MKIII"⁴.

That lineage is the context for what BLAMMO! is doing with the MKi: rather than cloning the most famous version, the company went back to the earlier, cruder circuit and tuned it for a slightly gated, raunchy fuzz tone¹.

Who makes it

BLAMMO! Electronics hand-solders and builds the P2P Tone Bender MKi in Portland, Oregon¹. The company's catalog is almost entirely fuzz: alongside the MKi and MKii it includes the Skronk Machine, a modernized Zonk Machine with NOS Russian germanium transistors, the Buzzaround, the P2P Buzz Tone, and the Brashmaster, its take on the 1972 Maestro Brassmaster. The P2P Buzz Tone, like the MKi, is built point to point on a custom turret board in stompbox format⁵.

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