It can be tempting to think of '60s fuzz as thin, but the TB-2W is most certainly not. (A Telecaster, as Pagey proved, makes a particularly lethal pairing.) Precision in fleet-fingered, high-gain leads yields searing, detailed, even complex individual notes. That's ideal for supercharging Stooges riffs or ripping Yardbirds, freakbeat, and proto-metal riffs. Bridge single-coils sound punky, primal, and substantial. For a classic three-germanium-transistor fuzz, it generates copious gain-particularly at the maximum-volume/maximum-gain settings many germanium fuzz users favor. The end product satisfies in all the ways a MKII should. 500-picked from Ant's own trove of vintage treasures for its smooth-but-nasty essence-and got to work. They selected a template: Sola Sound MKII No. But ultimately, Ikegami and his crew sourced enough to reliably build 3,000 TB-2Ws. (While it's true that some vintage pedals built with a certain transistor type may sound fantastic, most dedicated pedal builders agree that consistent, matched values-rather than brand and vintage-determine a transistor's suitability for a fuzz circuit.) That quest slowed the project. The effort hinged on a reliable source of germanium transistors. As meetings between circuit fiends tend to do, it led to an intriguing idea: Could Boss build a MKII that honors a MKII's many quirks and idiosyncrasies, and lives up to their own manufacturing standards? But the TB-2W was born from a serendipitous meeting between two bona-fide pedal maniacs: Boss president Yoshi Ikegami and Sola Sound chief Ant Macari. In an age of co-branding efforts gone bonkers, it's easy to imagine a project like this gestating in a board room and emerging as more style than substance. And it doesn't seem to sacrifice an ounce of attitude to get there. It's one of the most balanced and controlled Tone Benders I've ever played. And one of its great strengths is the way it consistently operates at the user-friendliest end of the MKII performance envelope. Which brings us to the Boss Waza Craft TB-2W Tone Bender, a collaboration between Boss and original Tone Bender manufacturer Sola Sound. And when you have a great one in your chain, you have a seriously expressive tool at your disposal. Yet these facets of the Tone Bender's performance, in aggregate, are also its strengths. And the low-mid and bass output usually fracture, crumble, and blur thrillingly under the weight of high gain. It produces hopping-mad treble peaks that love to feed back. It sounds and feels explosive and piping hot. But as popular as the MKII was and remains, it was never the easiest fuzz to wrangle. In the unlikely event you didn't know, the Tone Bender MKII was the fuzz voice of Jimmy Page in the late-period-original-Yardbirds and Led Zeppelin erasĀ-and about a gazillion other garage and psychedelic bands around the world (especially in its Vox-licensed guise).