FREE THE TONE Heat Blaster HB-2 Free The Tone

The HEAT BLASTER delivers a truly modern distortion sound, with a tone control plus high-cut and low-cut switches for additional tonal adjustment.
The high-cut switch attenuates the presence frequencies in order to produce a mellow tone that retains good projection. With the high-cut switch engaged you can use the tone control to achieve the required degree of projection. This type of setting is ideal for solos. The low-cut switch attenuates the low frequencies, making it easy to attain an ideal blend with bass and drums for a well-balanced band sound. The low-cut switch affects low frequencies that normally cannot be adjusted using amplifier tone controls.

Background & Development :

One morning I awoke with a great distortion sound in my mind. The sound was surprisingly distinct and clear, and similar to that of a modern high-gain tube amp. The HEAT BLASTER was born from the sonic image I awoke with that morning. But I had to get to work immediately in order to turn the mental image into actual sound before it changed or faded away. It was a race against time. I began mentally designing the circuitry on my way to the lab, and was ready to start building by the time I got there. All previous plans and appointments for that day were postponed while I set to work, and after about 6 hours of non-stop prototyping and testing I had a sample that delivered the required sound (definitely a speed record). The sound was almost exactly as I had imagined it. But that was all I could do in one day. I was exhausted. But I had my circuit, even though at that point it was nothing more than a bunch of parts directly soldered together… looking more like a jungle gym than a guitar effect. The following day the circuit was carefully installed in an enclosure so as not to alter the sound, and with a few more tweaks became the template for the HEAT BLASTER. My imagined sound was sort of “orange,” so the HEAT BLASTER enclosure is orange as well.