Anasounds Unleash the Sweetest of Tone Enhancers with their smart new FX Teacher Tape Preamp Pedal

I’ve long been a fan of vintage tape preamp style / boost pedals - dating back to my early use of Xotic FX’s Mini EP Booster. In fact for most of my pedal-chain’s history I’ve had some kind of Echoplex-style preamp / boost at the front of the chain. Nowadays mostly the JA Prism - this warms up and adds body and magical dynamics to my core signal - in exactly the same sort of manner as the FX Teacher Tape Preamp.

The FX Teacher Tape Preamp pedal has the simplest of control topologies - but hewn for maximum impact - where the interplay between the ’Louder’ and ’Dynamic’ knobs is particularly potent - while the ’Bass’ switch is all about refining and tightening up the low-end output - going from all-in, to less, and least amount of Bass.

The ’Louder’ knob combines both degree of gain and level of output - like a sort of vintage style Master Volume, while the ’Dynamic’ knob is mostly about setting the level of Volts passing through the circuit (from 3V to 27V) - which of course impacts on the Bias / Character and Texture of the output.

This is actually a really simple circuit, but where a whole lot of time has gone into the selection of the components - in particular the Type and Value of specially selected JFET’s - which need to be hand-matched for the optimal output.

There’s much to like about this pedal - while it’s not exactly the most typical of FX Teacher pedals - which usually have some customisable / switchable terminal blocks and the like. Here it is all about the quality and impact of the character and tonality of this pedal and its optimal components. In the simplest of terms this is a Tone Sweetener or Tone Enhancing Boost style pedal.

It could have been delivered as a Mini Pedal I feel - where a lot of the competition is nowadays for this style of pedal. While the top-mounted jacks very much make it eminently practical and usable - and overall very pedalboard-friendly. I would still quite like to see a Mini version of this at some stage - I feel that would be a very simple transition and another signifiant step forward.

I also think Anasounds could do a more deluxe later edition of this pedal with a few more fully granular tone controls - say 2-Band Eq - like on my JA Prism, or possibly one-up that with 3-Band EQ. Of course there are benefits to keeping things simple - while I tend to really like being able to tweak a pedal’s output fully to my exact preferences.