Friday, March 14, 2008

Ibanez: Return of the (Tube) King




So his majesty, the (Ibanez) Tube King has set foot in my humble abode. Ok, cut the shenanigans, if you are interested in the padal, please note the following:
  • it's strictly adaptor powered (12V)
  • it's heavy- 2kg
  • it's BIG- refer to the relative size comparison above (TK999 vs TS7), so pedal board proponents, please tkae note...

Tone wise, there's definitely a marked, tube presence upon activation. As Ibanez anticipated a lower-frequency mush-out when a tube saturates, a presence feature had been wisely included to offset the predicament. The other thumbs-up feature here is the pedal's VOID control which is a noise gate pot (that knob nearest to baby bear...) & it works wonders eliminating the background hissing typical of high gain devices. The TK999 is impressive as a stand alone pedal, capable of invoking that Les Paul type wooliness in the neck humbucker & all things creamy for that matter. Despite being labelled as a 'distortion' by the manufacturer, the pedal is indeed a high octane overdrive (for all things distortion, kindly refer to Visual Sound's Son of Hyde). It works very well boosting your other, lazy/ mild-mannered overdrive or simply opiating your amp's tubes to give you that tone nirvana. If you are looking for a metal type tone assault (despite the manufacturer's allegations that it could), you are reading the wrong literature- are you drunk?

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