Your introduction to fuzz

[Tin Shack King]

^ Very nice of him to do that.

Indeed!

[Doc Holliday]

Just received a kind e-mail from Mr. B.K. Butler himself, who advises that my Real Tube pedal was made in March of 1988.

Thought it was 80s. Looks like a very cool pedal

[mondo500]

^ I had a Tube Works MosValve amplifier in the early 90s... moved it on at some stage, but missed the Real Tube sound (the amp was basically a rack mounted version of the pedal with a transistor power amp and speakers attached)... some time after that I acquired the Real Tube and Blue Tube pedals when they could be had cheap on eBay. I did hang on to the Yugo valves that came with the amp – they're the ones that shipped with the pedals originally, not to everyone's taste but hard to find if someone's swapped out the valves... they do reward a bit of experimentation with 12AT7s or 12AU7s...

[HorseyBoy]

^^ Buddy of mine, who I played in several bands with, had one of the original four-knob Tube Driver pedals from the late 1980s, which he used to run through an old MusicMan combo amp. It was probably the first pedal I ever saw that wasn't made by Boss.

[Tin Shack King]

^ I had a Tube Works MosValve amplifier in the early 90s... moved it on at some stage, but missed the Real Tube sound (the amp was basically a rack mounted version of the pedal with a transistor power amp and speakers attached)... some time after that I acquired the Real Tube and Blue Tube pedals when they could be had cheap on eBay. I did hang on to the Yugo valves that came with the amp – they're the ones that shipped with the pedals originally, not to everyone's taste but hard to find if someone's swapped out the valves... they do reward a bit of experimentation with 12AT7s or 12AU7s...

The original tube that came in the pedal went microphonic years ago, and I swapped it out with an old RCA 7025 that came in a box with a bunch of old Heathkit parts that I had bought at a garage sale. It was a definite upgrade; a smoother and more gradual sweep into overdrive than the original tube had. Maybe it's because the performance of the original tube had deteriorated so much before it failed and went into full "squelch" mode, but when I put the old RCA 7025 in, it was noticeably better. It's still in there and still sounds great!