Benson Amps The Jeez

The Jeez asks the question…what if we weren’t beholden to improving historical germanium fuzz circuits and did our own novel take instead? Just saying…they were putting things like diced carrots in Jello when these were invented. Worth a shot?

The Jeez incorporates high headroom input and output amplifiers that offer unprecedented flexibility in a Germanium circuit. Like our previous fuzzes, we’ve kept the high input Z (doesn’t care what’s before it in the chain), but now we’ve added low output Z as well. This means Jeez can drive 16 volts of peak to peak signal through a guitar cable with amazing fidelity for cleaner settings, or absolutely punish an amp at higher settings if you want it to.

This flexibility also allows a huge range of usable gains and tones from the 2N404 transistors that are running at the normal 9Vish volts. With a turn of the gain knob, Jeez can go from a pure and low noise full frequency germanium clean boost, hit some treble booster overdrive and vintage dirt between 2-6, briefly entertain some truly tough sounding cranked plexi tones at around 7, and bliss out in germanium fuzz heaven at the very top.

This massive range of uses might make it hard to choose how to use it…which is a nice problem to have. The interesting thing about the Jeez is there is some envelope dependent bias excursion (cool word salad dude) that practically has the effect of sustaining notes that don’t seem like they would normally sustain…there are settings where you can play overdriven chords lightly, and then just picking a little harder break into more of a sustained sequence….one of those things that’s easy to miss on first go round but once you can hear it, using it intentionally is pretty gratifying. This is especially true at higher tone settings.