![]() We’re not talking pure AC30 Top Boost emulation here, but it gets pretty close. The kind of zing we associate with early Floyd is right there with presence at halfway, but you can easily call up something more smooth and restrained by whipping it over to the left, or steer into Vox territory by maxing it out. The bass and treble controls are nicely responsive too, but it’s presence that really transforms the character of the pedal. Dialling the gain down a bit quickly cures that, and this pedal’s intermediate crunch tones – while perhaps less outright entertaining than the full-on stuff – should not be overlooked.Īll three switches have a dramatic effect, and the common theme here is that the middle position is quiet, up is louder and down is full blast – so even if you leave the sensitivity switch alone there’s plenty of scope for tone-sculpting with the other two. It does indeed sound like an old amp running close to the ragged edge, with a fuzziness on the low E string that flirts with flatulence. The treble is crisp and frisky, the midrange is wide open and the bass has bags of shunt. This pedal is fitted with a little transformer for the ultimate amp-like response, and what you get above all with the gain knob cranked is looseness. But you know us – we’re going to head off straight in the direction of more noise. Where we go from there is not immediately apparent: the knobs and toggle switches are so interactive that it could take you half a day to explore every possible combination. Starting with the gain set low and the master volume keeping us close to bypass level, a little bit of knob-twiddling brings us a completely clean tone that extends the highs and lows of the bypass sound very nicely – it can actually make a small amp sound like a much bigger one. These let you play with the character of the bass and treble, and set the input sensitivity. You also get – alongside output volume, gain, bass and treble knobs – a trio of three-way toggle switches. So while the Scarlet Tunic doesn’t have the separate treble and bass channels of the original Selmer amp, it does have a presence control for adjusting the upper-midrange response. Adrian Thorpe is keen to point out that it can also cover the sounds of the Vox AC30 and Hiwatt DR103 – the latter being, perhaps not entirely coincidentally, strongly associated with the man who replaced Barrett in Pink Floyd, David Gilmour. That said, this is not purely a one-amp emulator. There’s no doubting the TNB50 is a killer amp, especially in its mid-60s ‘croc-skin’ iteration, and there has been talk of a Selmer revival in recent years (Alex Turner of the Arctic Monkeys is a big fan of the Zodiac Twin 30 combo). Maybe this is a chance for us to re-evaluate Selmer’s place in amplifier history. For the rest of us, it’s not so clear – after all, the amp in question is in the same ballpark as an E元4-driven Marshall JTM45 and there are already plenty of pedals that do that job. It actually started out as a favour for Lee Harris, the guitarist in Nick Mason’s Saucerful Of Secrets – basically a tribute act to Barrett-era Floyd, except with the real band’s drummer.įor Harris, the appeal of having a TNB50 in a box is obvious: it enables him to recreate those early Floyd tones without having to take a rare, heavy and potentially unreliable 50-Watt head on tour. You may be wondering why ThorpyFX, one of the UK’s most respected indie pedal builders, decided to create an ‘analogue emulator’ of Syd’s Selmer Treble ’N’ Bass 50 head. What went wrong? Well, the biggie was that the Beatles, the Shadows and the Animals all jumped ship to Vox but one player who was still using his Selmer towards the end of the 60s was Pink Floyd’s original frontman, Syd Barrett… and that brings us to the ThorpyFX Scarlet Tunic. READ MORE: Chapman M元 Semi-Hollow Pro review: A hard-charging wolf in spangly sheep’s clothing.These days you don’t hear so much about the long-defunct amplifier brand that started out as a London-based offshoot of that French firm, but there was a time when it seemed destined to be the sound of the British rock boom. They say the Selmer company still makes a mean saxophone.
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