Our first journey into the world of Sentimental Bob Electronics in Ukraine was the amazing Tacana Tap Tremolo, and it’s been three long years since. Thankfully, a package arrived a little while ago that contained not one but TWO new devices from these guys, and we’re excited to bring you the first today. The Tephra Distortion looks amazing right out of the box, one of those pedals you can just tell is gonna rock…and guess what? IT DOES.
The Tephra is a distortion with a blendable analog octave up and a booster, all combined in one compact package. The heart of the Distortion is the well-known “White Face” distortion unit with tantalum and non-polar capacitors without a single electrolytic capacitor in the signal circuit. By default, Tephra uses LM308H IC, along with an operational amplifier KR140UD1408A. These IC’s are complete analogues and were produced at the Kiev military factory in the late 80s.
The Octave Up section uses a transistor circuit from the 60s, but with a doubler on matched Schottky diodes. They add the cleanest possible octave with the least amount of noise, allowing the Blend potentiometer to work as smoothly as possible. This octave is monophonic. but if you are not afraid of dirt (thanks to precisely matched radio components), you can hit all the strings you want.
The clean Booster is based on a low-noise MOSFET circuit. it gives a large headroom in amplitude and allows you to warm up your amplifier. There also an additional opamp buffer here, which allows the Tephra to be better matched to other pedals and eliminates potential jumps in volume compared to the standard circuit due to different output impedances.
There’s also a clipping switch here that lets you choose from 6 different clipping options (OpAmp, Asymm, Symm, MOSFET, LED and Ge), leading to one of the most versatile distortion pedals we’ve played. Add in a low-pass Filter knob and plenty of output from the Volume parameter, and you’ve got one killer dirt unit. In our demo below, we run through all the clipping modes, toss in some octave and get generally a little nuts with all there is to do with the Tephra Distortion. Make sure to check it out, and then head over to Sentimental Bob Electronics’ Reverb shop to snag a pedal for yourself – cheers!!
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