Vox Tone Bender

The Vox Tone Bender is a fuzz pedal sold by Vox from 1966 into the 1970s, and it had the longest production run of any Tone Bender variant. Originally made in 1966, it was still being made in some form into the mid to late 1970s¹. Most examples were built in Italy, and the two-transistor circuit inside them is the same design family that inspired the Dallas Arbiter Fuzz Face².

For a player, the classic Italian Vox Tone Bender delivers a rather nasal and raspy fuzz sound without a lot of lower end, with treble content quite high for a fuzz pedal. Stompboxes.co.uk's history describes it as "a very unique sounding effect and an excellent pedal to use with dark sounding British valve amplifiers"¹. It also cleans up nicely with either the guitar's volume knob or the attack knob³.

What the Vox Tone Bender does

The pedal takes the guitar signal and clips it through a pair of transistors to produce a saturated fuzz tone. TONEHOME's page on the V8281 notes that "you can achieve plenty of output thanks to two germanium SFT transistors inside this pedal," and that the resulting sound is "rather nasal and raspy... without a lot of lower end"³. That bright, cutting character is the pedal's signature: compared with the Sola Sound Mk1.5, the Vox version featured a couple of minor circuit changes that resulted in "a slightly brighter, more cutting tone with less low end"⁵⁶.

The high treble content is what makes it pair well with darker amps, and the responsive cleanup from the guitar's volume knob is a trait it shares with other germanium fuzzes of the era³¹.

The circuit: a two-transistor fuzz close to the MK1.5

The Vox Tone Bender is very closely related to the two-transistor Tone Bender Mk1.5, an unofficial name given to the transitional circuit that Sola Sound built in the mid-1960s²⁷. That circuit matters in fuzz history because it inspired the Fuzz Face: Red Witch Pedals calls the Mk1.5 the "Father of the Fuzz Face," noting it used different germanium transistors and had a much less tight bottom end⁵, and RockBoard's PedalPedia likewise lists it as an inspiration for the Dallas Arbiter Fuzz Face⁷.

Aion FX's analysis goes further, describing the earlier Tone Bender version as "essentially the same circuit as the Fuzz Face," with one capacitor carrying a different value in the 1.5 circuit that "has very little impact on the sound"⁸. A Georgia Institute of Technology circuit analysis frames the Vox pedal as Vox Amplification's "own take on the Fuzz Face," listing the changes that distinguish the Vox circuit: NPN silicon transistors instead of PNP germanium, reduced coupling capacitor values, a resistance in series with the pot at the emitter of Q2, and a resistance in parallel with the output pot⁴.

The lineage runs the other way too. Stompboxes.co.uk's history says the Mk1.5's two-transistor circuit "is said to have been leaked/loaned to Arbiter who went on to release the legendary Fuzz Face later that same year," and that the same circuit was also used by Vox in their Italian production¹. BSM's page adds that Sola Sound built Gary Hurst's circuit, slightly modified and in large production numbers, as an OEM product for Vox⁹.

For context, the Mk1.5 sits between two larger designs: the original three-transistor Sola Sound Tone Bender MKI, based on Gibson's 1962 Maestro Fuzz-Tone⁵¹⁰, and the three-transistor MKII circuit¹¹.

Versions: the Italian units, the v828 and the V829

The Vox Tone Bender name covers several distinct pedals built over more than a decade.

The v828 was apparently intended for the American market: the model appears in Thomas Organ catalogs, and surviving examples overwhelmingly resurface in the United States. It was initially made by EME (Elettronica Musicale Europea), with production later taken over by the newly founded Jen company². British Pedal Company's history dates the move to the Italian Jen factory to 1967, resulting in the release of the V828 Tone Bender¹². Premier Guitar's Tom Hughes notes that by 1967 Vox had begun making the Tone Bender themselves in Italy, and that "the Italian-made Vox became the most widely available and recognized of all vintage Tone Benders"¹⁵.

The Vox Tone Bender Professional MKII was a different animal: a Sola Sound-built three-transistor fuzz supplied via Macari's Musical Exchange. Early Vox-branded units simply had the "Sola Sound" name obscured by a black bar and replaced with "Vox," before the graphics were redesigned with a much more prominent Vox logo. Earlier examples of the later version featured a triplet of Mullard OC75 transistors and slightly larger value input and output capacitors¹³. The MKII was discontinued in 1968, and its demise led to Sola Sound's development of the Vox Tone Bender MKIII¹³.

The MKIII, introduced in 1968, is its own tangle: pedals formally labeled "Vox Tone Bender MKIII" could have been built with any one of at least three entirely different fuzz circuits. The germanium version came with adjustable controls for volume, fuzz amount, and tone, and was built from the late 1960s to approximately the mid-1970s. The earliest "with treble 'n' bass boost" units used a silicon transistor circuit with just two controls, volume and tone, and were in production by August 1968; these were identical to Sola Sound's own Colorsound Jumbo Tone Bender pedals. A later "Hastings" edition was built into a cast aluminum enclosure and was likely manufactured in-house by Vox Sound Limited in Hastings, Sussex, based on Sola Sound's design¹⁴.

The V829 brought the design back in the 1990s. Premier Guitar's history records that between 1994 and 1997 Vox issued the V829 Tone Bender, based on the late-'60s MkI.5 but housed in a smaller enclosure⁶¹⁵. Tom Hughes, writing in Premier Guitar's Stompbox Classics series, says it appeared "announcing itself as 'Germanium Charged'" and that "it did indeed use a pair of modern generic germaniums," though "it's still not what we consider a real Tone Bender"¹⁵.

What builders and reviewers said

The DIY community has studied the circuit closely. IvIark's Guitar FX Layouts blog published layouts for the circuit in both PNP and NPN versions, and builders reported verified builds using an OC75 (73hfe) for Q1 and an OC76 (98hfe) for Q2, with the Q2 collector biased at 6.5V¹⁶. Builders also flagged practical tweaks: the 8K2 bias resistor may need adjusting if Q2 does not bias correctly, and the 4n7 output cap traps the lows at Q2's collector, with builders swapping in 150n, 10n or 22n values¹⁶.

Two builder verdicts from the comments on that page:

On the germanium-versus-silicon question, Guitar Pedal X's Stefan Karlsson noted that "Germanium Tone Benders can be a little difficult on the dial-in, sometimes temperamental even," reviewing a silicon MKII take¹⁷. Wren and Cuff's page for its UB-Stone recreation notes that most 1967 Vox Tone Bender examples the owner had heard differed in tone from Shinichi Ubukata's unit, which had a spongy, gated, sizzling character¹⁸.

The design also spread beyond a single brand: the Tone Bender MkII became so popular that Sola Sound agreed to build it under other monikers for such companies as Marshall, Vox, and Rotosound⁶, and the Vox Tone Bender itself appeared in both PNP and NPN circuit layouts.

Who used it

The Tone Bender family has a long artist roster, with a distinction between the Sola Sound originals and the Vox-branded pedal:

• The Beatles used Tone Benders, though the first one they used was the Sola Sound MKI, which first featured on the album "Rubber Soul"¹. Gary Hurst personally gave that pedal to George Harrison, but Paul McCartney was the one who ended up using it¹⁹. GuitarPlayer notes the Beatles were among those who used the Vox pedal²⁰.
• Paul McCartney and Mick Ronson used MKI versions²¹.
• Jimmy Page famously used a Tone Bender MkII²², and Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck and Mick Ronson are all named as Tone Bender users²³.

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