‘3-in-1 Grand Poohbah Treble Booster 2018’

Dallas Rangemaster 1960s

Vox Treble Booster

Nick Thurn 1978 Treble Booster. Nick is a guitarist who I met in Sydney in 1978 and was an extemely talented electronics technician as well as being an inspiring rock guitarist. Nick was the first guy I ever saw playing a Vox AC30 amp and he used a home made treble booster which was housed in a white painted aluminium box. Nick plugged his beautiful 1969 Stratocaster straight into the treble booster with its volume control set on full and then into the Brilliant Channel of his 1964 AC30. I was floored by Nick’s sound and his aggressive yet fluid playing. Nick had style to burn! We became friends and soon I had tracked down an old 1964 AC30 for myself and shorty after Nick built me a version of his treble booster. The booster sounded marvellous and I used it with my old Stratocaster into a valve WEM copycat echo and AC30 until the booster somehow got lost. Soon after I decided to make another treble booster and Nick taught me how to solder. I bought the parts at Sydney’s Radio House and also from Dick Smith Electronics at St Leonards. My home made NT Booster didn’t sound as good as Nick’s original and I could never work out the reason why. Now I realise that I should have persevered with trying different hfe BC547 transistors and other types of transistors, as well as juggling values of resistors and capacitors. From memory I think that the best transistors I used in this circuit were the BC547s. Later I got interested in other guitars amps and pedals and lost interest in the treble booster concept until the mid 1990s when the Brian May project brought me back to it again and I bought a Guild Brian May guitar which came with its own Guild Brian May treble booster twin transistor unit.

Fryer Ringmaster 2000: PNP AC128 Germanium transistor. A slightly unconventional ‘upside down’ PNP circuit a little like we found in the Deacy Amp but this circuit sounded surprisngly good, a very fat sound using the AC128

Fryer ‘Germanium Treble Master’ was drawn up 12th Nov 2001 for Dave Petersen’s build your own pedal article for Guitar Magazine London. This was a simple reworking of the basic Rangemaster circuit using a fatter sounding more powerful AC128 transistor and circuit values which I arrived at after trying test units in my workshop. We used the AC128 transistor in the DIY pedals because it sounded good with many amps and was readily available at the time, and the first pedals were like my prototype model featuring a switchable ‘thin/fat’ input cap giving either 4n7 or another 4n7 cap switched in parallel to produce approx 10nf. The pedal was popular and was issued in 2 runs by Dave Petersen, and was mostly produced in simpler form without the switchable input cap