What I learned modding a Tube Screamer for six months.
I rebuilt a TS-9 four times. The pedal got better. I got worse.
Two sides. One page.
Johnny argues the piece. Then he argues against himself. Somebody has to check his work. Read both, then call the winner below.
The take is shown below.
In the fall of 2024 I bought a used TS-9 in Brooklyn for $90 from a guy who was selling his board because his wife was pregnant. He told me he had played one show with it. I believed him because the pedal looked unplayed and because the receipt was in the box. Over the next six months I took that pedal apart at least a dozen times. I want to tell you what I learned.
First: the TS-9 is a great pedal that is intentionally crippled in three specific ways. The clipping diodes are 1N914s, which are bright but harsh. The op-amp is a JRC4558D, which is fine. The capacitor at C3 cuts low end below about 720 Hz, which is the famous 'Tube Screamer mid hump.' If you change any one of those three things, you change the pedal. If you change all three, you have built something that is not a Tube Screamer.
I did all three, in sequence, with a multimeter and a notebook. I am not a circuit designer. I am a guy with a soldering iron and a lot of time. The first mod, the diode swap to asymmetrical Schottky and silicon, was the biggest improvement. The pedal got more open, less compressed, less 'in a box.' The second mod, the op-amp swap to a Burr-Brown OPA2134, was almost imperceptible. I want to be honest about that. The third mod, the capacitor swap to extend the low end, made the pedal sound like a different pedal — closer to a Bluesbreaker than a Screamer.
Here is what I actually learned. The Tube Screamer is not a great pedal because of its components. It is a great pedal because the specific combination of those components — the cut bass, the mid hump, the symmetric clipping, the gain structure — does a specific job, which is to push a tube amp into breakup while keeping a single-coil guitar audible in a mix. The moment you mod those three things, you no longer have a tool that does that job. You have a different tool that does a different job, possibly worse.
Kobu (kobu.tinker) has been telling me this for years. He plays a Jaguar through an AC15 with a stock TS-9 in front, and the entire reason it works is that the TS-9 is doing its specific TS-9 thing. I modded my way out of that. I sold the modded pedal in March for $140 to a kid in Queens. I bought a stock TS-9 reissue and put it in front of my Deluxe. I have not opened it.
'The TS-9 is not a great pedal because of its components. It is a great pedal because the specific combination of them does a specific job.'
— Johnny
The pedal got better and I got worse is a tourist's confession. Modding is the education every builder on this masthead's best lists went through, and the crippled circuit was cost engineering, not scripture.
The essay's arc, six months inside a TS-9 ending in reverent surrender to the stock circuit, mistakes a beginning for a verdict. Take the roster of builders this magazine celebrates: Keeley started as a bench hot-rodding these exact Boss circuits, Analogman built an empire on TS mods, half the boutique era's founders learned the trade by changing C3 and seeing what happened. Every one of them passed through the phase this essay documents, the phase where your mods are worse than the factory's choices, and the ones who kept going came out the other side with catalogs. Quitting at month six and writing up the quitting as wisdom is describing the tunnel from inside and calling it the destination.
The intentionally crippled framing also romanticizes a spreadsheet. The 1N914s, the 4558, the C3 rolloff were not a zen master's constraints. They were 1979 cost engineering under a parts budget, and the proof is that Maxon's own engineers revised the circuit repeatedly when budgets allowed. The famous mid hump earned its reputation retroactively, because the records made with it were good. Treating the accident as sacred design and the modder as a vandal gets the history exactly backwards: the TS-9 is itself a mod of the TS-808 story, done for money.
And the conclusion, change all three things and you have built something that is not a Tube Screamer, is true and empty. Of course it is not a Tube Screamer. That was the point of the soldering iron. Something that is not a Tube Screamer is what the Timmy was, what the Morning Glory was, what every drive in this magazine's best columns was on the day its builder stopped respecting a classic's boundaries. The job the stock TS does is real, keep it on the board. The job the bench does is make the next pedal, and the essay walked out of the workshop just as it was starting to work.
Six months and four rebuilds did not make the author worse. They made him literate, and literacy always feels like getting worse right before it does not.
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