Take yourself down to the local guitar shop, peer into the pedal cabinet, and you will find all kinds of amp-in-a-box drives and preamps.
There will be overdrive pedals promising Marshall tone in a compact housing. There will be those offering Vox ACO chime, the tubular spank of a vintage Fender amp from the '60s. Many of them do the job superlatively, and can be used as a boost, overdrive, or as a powerful tone-shaper.
But Thorpy FX does the amp-in-a-box thing a little differently – or at least it casts the net wider to find cult guitar amps and replicate their tone in a pedal. Its latest, a collab with Lazy J, is a cracker. It’s called The J, and it is based on the J-20 tube combo.
You can even see one on the front of the pedal. Adrian Thorpe, founder of Thorpy FX, described this one as being a real collaboration between him and Lazy J’s founder, Jesse Hoff.
“Basically, what I wanted to achieve was the J-20 sound without the reverb and the trem,” says. “So we just wanted the drive, two channels, the drive section of the amp. And bear in mind, you have to be honest with yourself and say, ‘Can you capture everything that an amp can do in a pedal?’
“The real answer is no, because real amps move air and there is that visceral thing going on, but we were trying to capture from the front end to the back end, so really what’s coming out of the speaker. I think we’ve nailed it.”
What does it sound like? Tweed-era Fender “on ‘roids”. Think mid ‘50s Fender amps like the Tweed Deluxe, heavy on the mids. A Lazy J founder Jesse Hoff explains, this was an era of small bands, modern beat combos, Chuck Berry, the birth of rock ’n’ roll, and the electric guitar would be foregrounded.
Contrast this with Fender’s black panel era, when tube amps would take on a more scooped EQ profile, which Jesse Hoff believes was a reaction to the growing popularity of folk-rock and guitars having to fight through more instruments in order to find their place in the mix. The J-20 was taking that Tweed sound back to the ‘50s and then seeing where he could take it in the modern era.
When I moved to England, and I left all my gear in the States, so I built one based on the modified Deluxe... It wasn’t called the J-20 and it wasn’t called Lazy J. Then someone heard that and said, ‘Can you make me one?’
“Back in the ‘90s, when I was living in South Carolina, that was the only amp I had, the ‘50s Deluxe, and it wasn’t a very good live amp,” he says. “Because it was so broken up, no clean headroom, and I started messing with it to make it into a better live amp with more clean headroom, and louder, generally louder. And I got so far with that without drilling holes in the amp because it was collectible.
“When I moved to England, and I left all my gear in the States, so I built one based on the modified Deluxe, and this time I didn’t have to worry about drilling holes in it. I put reverb in it and tremolo, and that then became my amp. It wasn’t called the J-20 and it wasn’t called Lazy J. Then someone heard that and said, ‘Can you make me one?’”
People wanted this amp. Hoff would make them. And the rest is history.
The J is Thorpy FX’s second analogue amp emulator, following the release of the Scarlet Tunic, which channelled Syd Barrett’s tone and packaged vintage Selmer Treble ’N’ Bass 50 for your pedalboard.
The J replicates the key features of the J-20, with its Supply dial emulating the voltage attenuation control on the original tube amp, and presenting these sounds over two channels, Normal and Bright, each with their own footswitch.
Each channel has its own volume control. There is a master volume. There is a control for Response (a subtle presence control). Tone handles EQ. And that’s it. Boutique tweed tone, in a box, and yours for £329/$366.
The J is available now. Head over to Thorpy FX for more details.
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