Helios Tube Fuzz

Sunshine in a box! The HELIOS fuzz pedal is built on a vintage, hand-selected space-grade pencil tube and N.O.S. point-contact crystal diodes. This combination of tube gain stages followed by a crystal diode asymmetric clipping circuit delivers an incredibly warm and rich fuzzed guitar tone whilst preserving clarity and string-to-string definition. At full throttle this little pedal generates immense, bold fuzz tones with endless amounts of smooth liquid sustain that stretches notes into infinity. At lower fuzz and guitar volume settings it cleans up to produce some beautiful and natural sounding (real!) tube overdrive and distortion sounds.

Subminiature (or pencil) tubes were developed during World War II for missile control and therefore had to be exceptionally tough devices. These tubes were manufactured to meet the stringent MIL-E-1 specification for reliability and designed for long service life under conditions of severe shock, vibration (20,000G!), high temperature and high altitude. The subminiature tubes represent the pinnacle of tube technology and offer more consistent musical performance than the early NOS germanium transistors. Effectrode is now utilising these little tubes for peaceful purposes – to create extremely compact and tough little effects pedals!

Features

• All-Tube: 100% pure analogue vacuum tube audio path operating at amp plate voltages.
• Fuzz Flexbility: Stacks of rich, over-the-top fuzz sounds, which clean up nicely to produce warm, tubey drive tones with a turn of your guitar volume knob.
• ‘Fire’ Switch: Allows the second tube stage to be operated at reduced plate voltage (starvation) to generate a wide range of different fuzz tones.
• Crystal Diodes: A unique cascaded arrangement of crystal diodes gives the HELIOS more dynamic range and a rich, complex tone.
• True Bypass: With Effectrode’s unique ‘anti-pop’ or ‘thump’ footswitching circuitry
• Fitted with NOS gilded grid tube: The gold content is 5.4 mg in grids of both triodes. Military quality, “OTK” and military rhombus signed on the body – manufactured by MELZ plant (Moscow city, Soviet Union).