Thorpy's Hugely Accomplished and Wide-Ranging Scarlet Tunic Preamp is his most Instantly Gratifying Overdrive to-date!

The ThorpyFX Scarlet Tunic isn’t that big a secret, since Lee Harris of Nick Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets has been touring with it for most of this year! Saucerful of Secrets’ manifesto is to cover Pink Floyd’s early output right up until Dark Side of the Moon was released which of course launched them into the stratosphere.

The earliest Floyd albums feature Syd Barrett (RIP) on lead guitar - before the David Gilmour era, and he originally favoured the 50W Selmer Truvoice Treble n’ Bass Amp - particularly for studio work. So the Scarlet Tunic’s origin and starting point was at replicating the Selmer’s tonality - not from a particular circuit makeup perspective, but from its recorded tones. Where the early Pink Floyd recordings were a very significant benchmark in the origination of the Scarlet Tunic’s profile. While when working on the calibration, Thorpy realised how close he could also get the output to sounding like a Hiwatt DR103 at one end, and the Vox AC30 at the other - where the Selmer sound kind of occupies the middle ground. The Selmer Amp was particularly well regarded for its bite and attack - and that is of course beautifully carried across to the Scarlet Tunic. In fact you are superbly covered across Chime, Jangle, Bite and Crunch for an exceedingly widely textured and nuanced output.

Controls - Master (Volume), Presence (Upper Mids / Amp Voicing), Gain, Bass, Deep : 1 / 0 / 2, Bright (Bite) : 1 / 0 / 2, Sens (Gain Structure) : 1 / 0 / 2, Treble.

The Killer Control here is the Presence Knob - which regulates Upper Mid Frequencies - but in our context kind of works as an Amp Voicing control too. Each of the other controls are highly interactive with the Presence and Gain - including the handy trio of 3-way switches.

It turns out that Paul Kossof of Free fame also used a Selmer on the actual Studio Recording of ’All Right Now’ which requires you to set the Tunic’s Sens switch to its maximum ’Down’ position - this gives you exactly the right sort of crunch to deliver a successful rendition of those legendary All Right Now riffs.

With each of the switches in the middle you are in the neutral position - and the Scarlet Tunic essentially is at its softest. Flipping those switches Up delivers extra timbre and texture and accentuates the output profile - and in the Down position you get even more Depth, Brightness (Bite) and Gain / Saturation.

It’s great to start off in neutral mode and then gradually ramp things up. I suggest you start with Master, Presence, Bass and Treble all in the middle / noon position - with Gain starting up from circa 9 o’c. If you wheel the Presence control back to around 9 o’c the Tunic sounds more like a Hiwatt, and if you Max out the Presence - you are in Treble Boosted Vox territory. (Note that you will typically need to tweak Treble and Brightness controls too!)

So you can play around with the different amp voicings - then start ramping up the Depth and Brightness, and finally stepping up the Sensitivity / Gain Structure and overall Gain. There’s a huge variety of tones onboard from relatively soft to full out crunch (sort of Mid Gain really) - and I would have thought everyone should be able to easily tune this to their preferences.

I was up and running really quickly here. Thorpy gave me the ballparks for each of the different Amp Voicings / Presences and they’re actually pretty spot on to my ears - Most Hitwatt-y at 9 o’c, Most Selmer-y in the Middle, and Most Vox-y at Max. You can of course fine-tune from there - while you get to the distinct voicings really quickly. The biggest surprise for me truly was just how easy this pedal was to dial in - and how satisfactory that process was in getting to killer tones via such rapid means.

I’m not a particular aficionado of early Pink Floyd - while you can most definitively get pretty much that exact same tonality out of the Scarlet Tunic and a lot more besides. Ever since Thorpy told me about Paul Kossof using the Selmer for All Right Now - I’ve mostly been on the crunchier site of things - while I really love being able to sweep the Presence control in either direction and get straight into Hiwatt and Vox territories almost instantly.

Readers will know I’m a huge Thorpy fan - and that his Peacekeeper is one of my all-time favourites. While with the Peacekeeper - in order to get some of my preferred softer tones - it does take a little delicate tweaking to get it exactly where you want to. With the Scarlet Tunic by contrast getting exactly where you want to is a breeze. I love how you can set a tone, and then ramp it up with the trio of switches, and finally sweep the Presence dial to dramatically shift the voicing.

I often talk about pedals being a delight to use - and the Scarlet Tunic is right up there on that scale - pretty much instant gratification, and with so much range on the dials that you can take it into incredibly far-flung territories in the least amount of moves - sometimes just flicking a switch - just really satisfying! Note also that it has excellent gain clean-up via your guitar’s volume control. Just really dynamic and responsive and very much amp-like in behaviour courtesy in part of a supreme audio transformer.

I’m currently at a point where I am finding it difficult to decide where I enjoy the Presence dial set to the most - it’s pretty much spending equal time in Hiwatt, Selmer and Vox territories so-to-speak. It has a slightly different breakup to my beloved Pettyjohn Chime II on the Vox voicing - but sounds every bit as good. The only downside here is that this pedal is such a chameleon in so many ways - that you may very well get confused as to which is your favourite use for this pedal.

For sure it has its roots in early Syd Barrett Pink Floyd, but there’s so much more to this tone machine. The choice of controls here and what they deliver is nothing short of magical. There are so many great Overdrives out there - and you probably thought you had all the key ones already - but this is another must-have for me.

There aren’t any other Selmer style pedals on the market currently as far as I understand - and one that can also deliver you into Hiwatt and Vox territories is surely something most people can get behind. This one’s going to prove very difficult to shake from the pedal-chain! It’s that rare Signature pedal that is far far greater than the sum of its parts!

Are any of you as excited about this release as I am?

The Scarlet Tunic Analog Amplifier Emulator is available for order right now on the ThorpyFX Webstore for £264.99 - and will hit leading dealers pretty rapidly over the next few days.

NOTE that power supply is strictly 9V, which is internally bumped to 18V. Current draw is circa 30mA, 25mA on standby.