The Attitude of the Tone Bender MKI – and beyond! | Reeves Electro Black Hat Sound Professional

The Attitude of the Tone Bender MKI – and beyond! | Reeves Electro Black Hat Sound Professional

NOS silicon transistors from 1970s Northamptonshire. A pressed steel big box. Point-to-point wiring so precise it looks like sculpture. Welcome back to Edge of Breakup.

In this episode, the Reeves Electro Black Hat Sound Professional takes center stage — running into my Shock the Fox Dee-Cee TGF loaded with a Righteous Sound King Street P90 and Emerson Custom wiring, into a Benson Redland 35 Head and Benson 2x12" cabinet loaded with Scumback H75-PVC speakers.

Reeves Electro is the work of Markus Reeves — building small-batch, handcrafted point-to-point fuzz and drive pedals from a garden workshop in Northamptonshire, UK. No PCB. No circuit traces. Every component wired directly, point to point, with a precision that makes the inside of the pedal as visually remarkable as the outside. Markus builds 10 to 20 pedals per batch, releases them on a mailing list drop, and they disappear immediately.

The Black Hat Sound Professional is the full-featured, big-box evolution of Markus's flagship fuzz. The base circuit is a variation of his 183Sound — a Colorsound-inspired fuzz — extended with an external bias control and voiced to achieve the aggressive, grainy, on-edge snarl of the MK1 Tonebender. To be clear in Markus's own words: this is NOT a MK1 circuit — it just has the snarl and attitude of one. The Professional edition adds Tone and Mids controls to the standard Volume and Bias configuration, giving the circuit a fully granular tonal palette that the standard BHS can't match. The transistors in the Professional are voiced slightly brighter than the standard version to compensate for the Tone stack's effect on presence.

At the heart of it all: a matched pair of super rare vintage NOS ME4003 TO106 cased Blackhat silicon transistors from the 1970s. These aren't available anymore — Markus has confirmed he has run out of the original stock — making each Black Hat Sound a genuinely finite piece of fuzz history. The bias control sweeps from flowing, musical Gilmour-style sustain at one end, through voltage-sag territory and gated Neil Young tweed-collapse tones in the middle, all the way to nasal FZ1-style Fuzztone at the far end. A bass boost switch adds thunderous low-end weight on demand.

The Shock the Fox Dee-Cee TGF — built by Mathew Tye Tyler from a single board of Pecky Cypress — brings its bolt-on neck, dual carbon fiber reinforcement, Halon 1/2 Tele bridge aged in Greece, and Righteous Sound King Street P90 to the session. The King Street is an early-P90-inspired low-wind Alnico 2 design — broad midrange, growly lows, top-end chime. Emerson Custom Premier Pro wiring throughout.

The Benson Redland 35 Head delivers 35 watts of 6L6-driven American tone with Chris Benson's uniquely interactive Redland EQ and Benson's patented tube-driven power scaling. The Benson 2x12" is loaded with Scumback H75-PVC speakers — faithful recreations of the pre-1971 G12H 25W Kraft paper voice coil Greenback Pulsonic cone. Woodier and more upper-mid-forward than the standard H75, with thunderous low-end headroom and an open cabinet response that a point-to-point silicon fuzz loves.

This is a pedal that exists in finite quantity. It sounds like nothing else. Markus built it right.

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🎸 Shock the Fox Dee-Cee TGF | Pecky Cypress | Righteous Sound King Street P90 | Emerson Custom Wiring

🎛️ Reeves Electro Black Hat Sound Professional | NOS ME4003 Blackhat Silicon Transistors

🔊 Benson Redland 35 Head & Tall Bird Plus | Benson 2x12" Cabinet | Scumback H75-PVC Speakers