Let me tell you how it will be…

Whether it be the funky, syncopated almost-clean rhythm of “Drive my Car” or the all-out finger-blistering chaos of “Helter Skelter”, the gentle crunch of “Paperback Writer” or the riotous Hendrix chords of “Taxman”, don’t worry — Mr. Heath will get you there. And unlike the real Edward Heath sneered at by George Harrison and the fab four, all this pedal will charge you is a little bit of electricity to get things going.

When transistors became powerful, plentiful and — more importantly — cheap enough to use in professional audio applications, guitar amp manufacturers were eager to incorporate this new technology into their products. In the very beginning though, a lot of them didn’t seem to quite know how to handle these new wonder semiconductors.

Vox, after a change in ownership, began to build hybrid guitar amps that featured a solid-state preamp with their usual EL84 power section. However, unlike other manufacturers experimenting with the same technology, Vox came up with some unusual ways to create an “Overdrive‘ channel for these amps. The result turned out to be something between overdrive and fuzz. Lucky for them, their most famous endorsers — The Beatles — happened to like it, and those amps are featured on several tracks from “Rubber Soul” all the way to ”The White Album“.

The Mr. Heath is not an attempt to faithfully replicate the circuitry of those amps, but simply create a replica (or more precisely, an approximation) of that most unusual but useful distortion.

If you’re interested to know more about how this pedal came about, check out my journal entry “Tone Chasing The Beatles Part 2 – Mr. Heath.