VALVE GRINDER

The Valve Grinder concept originated around 1995, when I was working in a Portland amplifier repair shop called Entertainment Electronics. I was using silverface Fenders for a clean sound, and wanted an overdriven Marshall sound from a foot pedal. At the time there were a limited number of solid-state boxes and only a few with tubes (usually running at low voltage). My boss, Jim Flynn, helped me design a pedal with two 12AX7s running at high voltage. The last stage of the second tube functioned as a single-ended output section based on the Fender Champ. The cascading preamp was modeled after the Marshall Club and Country series because of the simplicity. The equalization was based on the silverface Twin because of the wide bandwidth.