“To call this simply a ‘gated fuzz pedal with an echo feature’ would be an injustice to its essence!”: Benson Amps teams up with Jessica Dobson for the awesome and unorthodox Deep Sea Diver Fuzz-Echo

Benson Amps has unveiled signature pedal developed with Seattle-based indie-rock stalwart Jessica Dobson that will help you nail her Deep Sea Diver electric guitar tones – and a lot more besides.

The Deep Sea Diver Fuzz-Echo was a lot time coming. It took over three years it took to design this. Dobson says the original idea was simply to pair a vintage fuzz with an vintage-sounding echo, but she and the Benson R&D team went down the rabbit-hole, delivering a pedal that turned out to be a platform for tone adventurists.

“One of my favourite pedal configurations has always been running my echos and delays before my dirt pedals to get unorthodox sounds,” says Dobson. “So, we started there and it morphed into a pedal than became bigger and wider than what we initially had imagined.”

You will be able to dial in that “skronky” gated fuzz sound that is all over the Deep Sea Diver canon. But what seems more likely is that you’ll find some strange tones to call your own. Dobson assures us that her fuzz-echo twofer contains multitudes.

“To call this simply a ‘gated fuzz pedal with an echo feature’ would be an injustice to its essence!” she says. “Beyond the splatty gated sounds, I wanted a fuzz that could get wooly and straight forward, or shake hands with my favourite gauzy My Bloody Valentine textures.

“I wanted it to clean up nice and work as a treble booster for my guitar solos, or sound like a foreign landscape of oscillation and interrupting textures. Simply put, it has become the most interesting and versatile pedal on my ‘board.”

The Deep Sea Diver Fuzz-Echo pairs a three-transistor silicon fuzz circuit, inspired by mk1.5 and mk2 Tone Benders, and an echo circuit designed around the PT2399 CMOS echo/delay processor chip, a digital chip that was given a tweak by Benson so that it plays especially nice with the fuzz circuits

Although the PT2399 might be digital, it can be put to work on a delay with an old-school analogue quality, and that’s what we have here. It has been designed to be placed anywhere in the signal chain.

Deep Sea Diver Fuzz-Echo Pedal by Benson Amps - YouTube

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That footswitch does a lot of work. Hold it down and the pedal will oscillate on command. Players can switch up the order of the fuzz and echo effects by simply holding down the footswitch while powering the pedal up.

Benson recommends the echo into fuzz setting, in which the LED illuminates in orange. The LED is green when the fuzz circuit is before the echo. There are dials for Bias, Gate, Volume, Echo, Feedback and Rate. It takes 9V DC from a pedalboard power supply, drawing 100mA.

Benson Amps x Jessica Dobson - Deep Sea Diver Fuzz-Echo // Full Demo - YouTube

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Priced £259/$249, the Deep Sea Diver Fuzz-Echo is available now. See Benson Amps for more details.