Benson Preamp demo

This pedal was bought in the search for a transparent pedal to act as a front end for my 1978 Fender Twin Reverb.
Lovely though it is, it was never designed as an amp to give an overdriven sound. It was made to be loud and clean.
I have tried pedals to give me a slightly broken up sound in the past with mixed success. They all sounded a bit 'fake' if you know what I mean but I was lured into purchasing this pedal on a Friday visit to the guitar shop.

It is apparently a circuit equivalent to the Benson Chimera amplifier but using FETs instead of valves, so the circuit interactions are comparable. Now, I have never played one of those amps and am unlikely to find one to try this out but what's important is that I am using it pretty much all the time now into the Twin whereas before I used a pedal for a bit then packed it up and plugged straight in again as it didn't sound as good. More distorted sure but not as good.

Now, this Benson sounds good. Really good. It feels like part of the amp and I would see no reason to not use it.

I start the video with the most transparent settings I could of my Orca 59 on the bridge pickup into the Benson then into the Twin Reverb on 5 and tweak various settings but settle on the best one for me.

I like to use it with just a touch of overdrive that I can dial in and out with the volume control.

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