Crazy Tube Circuits Heatseeker

Like a missile seeking its target, Heatseeker will give you the explosive sound of rock! Inspired directly from the gear setup used by Angus Young, it features the most important sonic elements to match the tone of the short-pants-rock-God.

It’s no secret that a major role to his sound, along with the Marshall-brick walls, played one of the first wireless systems for guitar that quickly became a classic among guitar greats, the Schaffer Vega Diversity System.

The preamp along with the Dynamic Expansion circuit found in the wireless transmitter/receiver gave it its distinct sound. Besides boosting the signal, the preamp tightens up lower frequencies and slightly accentuates mid frequencies while the Dynamic Expansion circuit enhances the dynamic response and harmonics of the signal giving punch and attack to ensure that it will cut through the mix. Instead of opting for a prefix setting for the Dynamic Expansion circuit as found in the original unit, we have re-imagined our version with the enhance knob on the Heatseeker to have more control over the guitar tone’s dynamic response. Setting it around 10 o ‘clock is a good starting point to add some extra sparkle. Max it out to bring back to life even the most dull and colorless sounds.

Utilizing an all-analog JFET circuit, running on 27 volts via an internal voltage boost (DO NOT plug higher than 9V DC power supply), we have captured the tone and feel of three British tube amplifiers, synonymous with the sound of rock and roll, with excellent clean-to-mean dynamic response. With the flip of a toggle switch you can capture the sound and feel of a JTM45, 1959 Super Lead or JMP 2203. A smart switching circuit follows the signal path and respective gain stages tuned for each amp and combines them with an actual Marshall style EQ and power amp simula- tion circuit for thundering rock tones. Angus Young usually plugs into Channel 1 or High Treble input of his JTM45s and Super Leads so we opted for that sound when we started visualizing Heatseeker on the drawing board. We have also extended the range of the presence control beyond the original’s so that the user will be able to match the pedal to any amp or gear setup. The master volume offers plenty of output so that you can also use the pedal as a preamp and plug it to a clean power amp or straight to your DAW. Note that the pedal doesn’t feature any speaker simulation circuit so we recommend using a separate hardware or software guitar speaker simulation when going direct to DAW or a full range speaker.