Benson Amps Deep Sea Diver Fuzz-Echo

Over the last 3 years, Benson Amps has been working with their long time friend and associate Jessica Dobson from the Seattle band Deep Sea Diver to take her signature sound (fuzz and delay) and put it into one box. Benson started with a silicon three-transistor fuzz variant (kind of a deranged mashup of mk1.5 and mk2) and tweaked it into oblivion.

The two main controls of the fuzz (bias and gate) cover a wide range of sounds from aggressive treble booster to thick, dark textured fuzz to the gated skronky sounds often found in the Deep Sea Diver discography. These controls are interactive and change the EQ and distortion profile with even small tweaks…a lot of fun to be had!

The echo is from a tweaked data-sheet PT2399 that is perfectly tuned to the fuzz side and has the standard time, feedback and level (echo) controls. Holding down the footswitch will send the echo into sustained feedback at some settings, which, in conjunction with a short delay time, is a sound that can be found all over DSD records.

One unique feature of the Fuzz-Echo is the ability to change the fuzz and echo orders. This is done by powering the pedal on while the footswitch is pressed. The LED will be green if fuzz is before echo, and orange if echo is before fuzz.

The Fuzz-Echo does not care where it is in the signal chain, or what guitar (or bass! or synth!) is used. It will have a small amount of hiss, even on “cleaner” settings. If you find yourself thinking about the hiss, play a guitar solo instead!