Despite carrying the Tone Bender name, the mid-’70s Supa Tonebender is a very different beast from the earlier germanium MkI, MkII, or MkIII Tone Bender circuits. By this point, Sola Sound / Colorsound had moved into a different era of fuzz design, and what emerged was a four-silicon-transistor circuit often compared to the legendary Ram’s Head Electro-Harmonix Big Muff Pi.

The comparison makes sense, but this pedal has its own voice. Unlike the Big Muff’s diode clipping architecture, the Supa Tonebender relies more on transistor saturation to create its distortion, resulting in a fuzz that feels rawer, more immediate, and a touch less compressed.

And that is exactly what this pedal delivers.

Think massive wall-of-sound fuzz, huge sustain, muscular low end, and harmonically rich overtones that make single notes sing and chords sound enormous. Compared to some Big Muff variants, there is a bit more bite and directness here — less polite, more alive.

This 1975 example remains all original and wonderfully honest. It is not a museum-clean piece, but exactly the kind of vintage pedal one likes to see: intact, untouched, and full of character. There are a few marker marks around the controls from previous owners marking favourite settings — these can be removed but somehow they make a pedal like this cooler. Thanks to its BC169B silicon transistor setup, this pedal is an absolute mean machine. It sounds absolutely awesome!