Tube Screamer TS808

In the early 1970s Ibanez was known mostly for copies of Gibsons, Fenders, and Rickenbackers. By the middle of the decade it was getting into pedals, and it wanted an answer to the Boss OD-1.

Ibanez’s pedals were built by Nisshin, the Japanese firm behind the Maxon brand. Nisshin had already made Ibanez an orange “Overdrive” and then the OD-855 Overdrive II, which had the green paint and the square footswitch before the Tube Screamer did.

In 1979 Tamura drew up the circuit. He wanted a pedal that behaved more like an overdriven tube amp, and he was frank about the competition: the Boss OD-1 and the MXR Distortion+. He tested it through a 1968 Fender Twin Reverb and a Vibrolux Reverb, and now and then a Marshall Super Lead.

Two things shaped the sound before anyone heard it. Boss held the patent on solid-state asymmetrical clipping, so Tamura went symmetrical. And he turned down several op-amps as too expensive before settling on a plain little chip, the JRC 4558D. Maxon couldn’t export, so Nisshin sold the pedal at home as the OD808 and Ibanez sold it everywhere else.

Three knobs: Overdrive, Tone, Level. That’s the whole control panel.

Inside, two silicon diodes sit in the op-amp’s feedback loop and round off the peaks of your signal, softly and evenly. The circuit blends some of your clean signal back in with the clipped one, which is why it doesn’t flatten you out. Play softly and it backs off. Dig in and it growls.

The real trick is what it does to the frequencies. It trims the bass and pushes the midrange, the famous “mid hump.” That’s the sound of a guitar that doesn’t get lost when the band comes in. Put it in front of an amp that’s already breaking up, and the amp tightens and leans forward. It’s why metal players keep one in front of a high-gain amp to firm up the low end.

It doesn’t add much dirt. It decides where the dirt goes.

Then there’s the chip. The 4558 has a whole mythology, with players hunting for the right one like a lucky coin. People who have taken the circuit apart tend to say the diodes do most of the work and the op-amp matters less than the legend says. Depends who you ask. I’d spend the time on the Tone knob.

The TS808 itself didn’t last long. The run is usually dated 1979 to 1981. Then came the TS9, also Tamura’s, nearly the same circuit with a different output stage, a bit brighter and less smooth. The TS10 followed in 1986, part of the Power Series, built with cheaper parts.

After that the family never stopped growing. A TS9 reissue in 1992, the TS9DX in 1998, the TS7 in 1999, a reissued TS808, and in 2008 the hand-wired TS808HW, the first Tube Screamer with true bypass. Maxon still makes its own OD808. Modifiers like Keeley and Analog Man went to work on them, and the clones are past counting.

A lot of the famous Tube Screamer players are really TS9 players: Trey Anastasio with two of them, Gary Moore, Adrian Smith, Joan Jett on a TS9DX. Lee Ritenour helped make the name. But the player everybody pictures standing on one is a Texan with a beat-up Strat.

November 1982. Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble spend three days, the 22nd to the 24th, at Jackson Browne’s studio in Los Angeles and come out with Texas Flood. Vaughan plays mostly his “Number One” Stratocaster, through two Fender Vibroverbs and Browne’s Dumbleland Special.

The engineer, Richard Mullen, kept the effects list short: “The only effect he used was an Ibanez Tube Screamer.” And even that one barely gets a look in. It’s there for the gritty solos on the title track and on “Testify,” and that’s about it.

Now, which Tube Screamer? This is where people get loud. One camp hears a TS808 in the snarl on “Texas Flood,” and on “Testify” too. The other says Vaughan had a TS808 only briefly, from late 1981 into early 1982, that it never made an official release, and that from the middle of 1982 to the middle of 1988 his pedal was the TS9. Nobody has settled it.

What he wanted from it is clearer. Here’s Vaughan in 1983:

“I use the Tube Screamer because of the tone knob. You can turn it on slightly to get a Guitar Slim tone, which is how I use it.”

Slightly. Sammy Ash heard a scream in the thing, and it will scream if you ask. The man who made it famous asked it for a little tone, a couple of solos’ worth, and let the Strat do the talking.