Mason FX Pedals Mason FX Love Bender Mk1.5

The Mason FX Love Bender Mk1.5 is a fuzz pedal from Mason FX Pedals, a builder based in Virginia. It takes its design from the Tone Bender, the two-transistor fuzz circuit built by Sola Sound in the mid-1960s, and adds a twist of its own: a Bass control that lets you dial back the effect's low end, something the original two-knob layout offered no way to do.¹²

What it does

The pedal follows what Delicious Audio's Paolo De Gregorio described as "the usual 2-knob configuration of the Tone Bender (Volume and Attak, i.e. Gain)" and adds a Bass control to tame the effect's low end.¹ In practice that gives you three knobs:

The Bass control is the pedal's main departure from the circuit it is modeled on. On the original Mk1.5 style fuzzes, a player fighting a boomy low end had no control to reach for; here the third knob handles it.¹

Where the design comes from

The Tone Bender MK1.5 was, as Fuzzboxes.org puts it, "an influential two-transistor fuzz box that was built by Sola Sound in the mid-1960s."² Some of the earliest MK1.5 units were housed in gold-painted enclosures rather than the more commonly seen gray ones, and the related Vox Tone Bender v828 was built in a very similar style enclosure and is easily mistaken for the MK1.5.²

Original units hold their place among players: Red Witch Pedals keeps "an original unit from 1966 to A/B against" in its collection, a measure of how sought after the early two-transistor fuzzes remain.³

What reviewers said

Delicious Audio featured the pedal in December 2021, with Paolo De Gregorio writing that "The attention to detail in the packaging is breathtaking."¹ The site also added the Love Bender Mk1.5 to its article about the best Tone Bender clones, placing it alongside other pedals built on the same circuit lineage.¹

Questions