Rodolphe Puccio's Tampco Unleashes the Highly Formidable Silicon Transistor All-Bender Multifuzz Unit

Rodolphe Puccio’s Tampco is only fairly recently established - as of June 2021 by what I can see, and his 4th Pedal already - the All-Bender is All-Killer! Rodolphe has an exceptional pedigree, having cut his teeth as such - working previously as an engineer at Effectrode, and at Anasounds before that.

Rodolphe specialises in the development of high-spec solid-state amplification circuits, and for his 4th pedal he’s taken on that Fuzz Holy Grail of the all-in-one Tone Bender - covering off MK I, MK I.V, MK II and MK III varieties. This is actually my second all-rounder Tone Bender after the Menatone Law Bender - which did not quite get properly into MK I territory. While on the Tampco All-Bender - that is the first circuit option offered up.

Rodolphe has chosen to utilise more readily available and more stable Silicon Transistors - versus the Germanium varieties of the originals. That is a fairly well trodden path - where both Basic Audio’s John Lyons have gone before as well as Reeves Electro’s Markus Reeves - and achieved some considerable success.

The trickiest Tone Bender flavour to capture has always been the MK I variant - which always involves a significant amount of tuning the circuit by ear. That’s always the acid test for these Multi-Benders - where the other voicings are more easily reached typically.

Controls - Gain I, Gain I.V, Gain II, Gain III, Tone III, Level, Type : I / I.V / II / III.

Rodolphe’s elegant and smart solution here gives you a topology of individual Gain controls for each of the 4 Tone Bender voice variants, then a separate Tone control - only applicable to the MK III voicing, next a Level / Output control, and finally a Type selector - where you can switch between those 4 types.

This is a really cool take on the format and differs from most in having those dedicated selections - versus more general controls - where you would need to fully tune in each specific variant - but have more extended range off the top of that. The All-Bender topology authentically follows those original pedals - which mostly just had 2 controls while the MK III and IV varieties of course had an additional Tone control.

Me personally - I would quite have liked for the Tone control to apply to all voicings - as you often will want to fine-tune the voicing a touch, but can understand from a point of authenticity why this was done as it is. Also - even though this circuit uses stable Silicon Transistors - I typically still like to have access to a Bias control - to be able to get into more gated / velcro textures which also helps accentuate a MK I voicing - but again can understand why it was considered surplus to requirements here.

The All-Bender is available right now from the Tampco Webstore for an introductory price of €166 which I feel is very good value. I of course snapped one up for myself pretty much as soon as I came across it - and will be doing further follow-ups on my own experience with the pedal - including how authentic it manages to get for the MK I voicing in particular - which is the toughest of all to achieve - with that lovely dry reedy edge to it! Hopefully mine will be with me before the end of this month!

I expect this pedal to do really well - are any of you guys tempted here? In fact who else as hit the trigger already?