Teisco's Big Comeback — The JHS Show

In this article, I want to talk about a brand that completely disappeared from the face of the earth for decades, and then dramatically reappeared in 2018. This is basically the Captain America of guitar brands. It's amazing. It’s iconic. Naturally, I’m talking about Teisco.

Teisco was originally established in the 1950s and quickly became one of Japan's prominent guitar makers, alongside legendary brands like Guyatone. They disappeared decades ago, but suddenly at Winter NAMM in 2018, they reappeared as a pedal brand. I want to try to explain how strange this is. It would be like Leo Fender hanging up his hat in the 1970s as a guitar builder, and then relaunching the Fender brand in 2018 to make fuzz pedals. Same ballpark, but wildly different products.

I remember walking through the NAMM hall in 2018, and seeing these brightly colored pedals in a booth labeled “Teisco”. I immediately said to myself, “Wait, Teisco's a guitar company. They made funky guitars back in the ’60s. I own a few of them. What's up with this?” So I tracked down the amazing team that put this brand back together and launched these pedals, because I had to know what was happening.

Here’s what Lauren (AVP, Communication and Partnerships) had to say: “Teisco has never been a brand that's been defined by a single product. It's always been defined by the blending of electronic signals or electronic waves and music and traditional instruments and what you can get out of that. People think about Teisco and the defining thing is unconventional design, bold expression, and obviously crazy guitars, lots of switches, unusual pickups. That was in the essence of what Teisco was...Also pedals are such a great way now [for guitarists to express themselves] and have become such an important part of many guitarists’ setups. It does allow you to be bold and expressive. The main thing for us is that we are taking the spirit of what has defined Teisco decade after decade, and we're applying that to our product design, to our product delivery, and to our brand expression.”

So, I want to take a look at some of these baller new pedals. As always, you’re going to get more out of this article if you go back and watch the JHS episode it was based on (mostly because you’ll have a point of reference for our epic jam sessions), but do what you gotta do.

Overdrive

First up is the Overdrive. This pedal came out very recently, and it's fantastic.

It’s designed and built in the spirit of soft clippers like the Tube Screamer and the Timmy (or even my Morning Glory), so it creates the sound of a light to medium gain overdrive. It has a treble and bass control that are really powerful, plus it has a kick switch, which gives you a little more gain and a mid-bump when you engage it. That mid-bump compliments the sound of this pedal very well, and it works great with humbuckers and single coil pickups.

Delay

In the video, I demoed the Overdrive with the Delay. The Delay was part of the original release when they relaunched the brand, and it's wild. It's based around a 3205 chip set, kind of in the lineage of a BOSS DL-2. Think of it as a bucket brigade vintage 1980s delay.

Now, this pedal does great with simple slapback, really nice quarter note sounds, and all the things you expect from a bucket brigade delay. But it has a whole other side as well. Think of it like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Same guy, two very different personalities. It has a really unique, wild, crazy, and fantastic modulation circuit. It's designed to do the simple stuff, but it’s also designed to run away, be crazy, and do sounds that lame people would hate. Lame people don't like creative delay, and honestly they don't deserve this pedal.

But you deserve this pedal, so do yourself a favor and go buy one.

Boost

The Teisco Boost is really, really interesting. You can run it at 9 or 24 volts with a switch, which does that internally, and then it has normal, treble, and flat knobs, so this is different low frequency roll offs.

In the demo, I put it in the treble position, which has a hint of a Rangemaster tone to it. I also slammed the Boost pedal directly into the overdrive for this jam, which was epic. If you don't want to treble boost, you just go to regular or flat instead, and you can get sounds like EP Booster or pretty much any other boost on the market. This pedal does a really good job of covering anything you might possibly need from a boost.

Interface

Next up is Teisco's newest offering. It is called simply the Interface. Sounds like something out of The Matrix, doesn’t it?

Honestly, you’re not far off the mark. Let me shoot straight here: I’m a simple man with a fairly small brain, and this pedal does a ton of stuff. It does so much stuff that I tend to get lost, even a little overwhelmed, by the sheer volume of features it has. It's amazing. It's revolutionary. I had to ask Ben (the designer) exactly how he would pitch this to someone like me, and here’s what he said: “It gives you the functionality of a simple recording, so that you can record the [track] from your pedalboard, but you can also use it for silent headphone practice. You can use it as an effects router or just for general routing purposes.”

Sounds simple enough, right? Basically, I was able to route this from my guitar into the Interface and then into ProTools, which allowed me to run my guitar signal into the Capitol Chambers plugin that duplicates the reverb chambers that Les Paul designed, then back into the Interface from the DAW and into my amp, which is being recorded into ProTools. Can I take a moment here to clarify that I accomplished this in my office? That’s bananas.

It's amazing. The Interface is a truly unique piece of gear that you can use a ton of different ways, which means it’s basically the new staple for the modern guitarist’s pedalboard.

Distortion

Next up is the Teisco Distortion, which is easily one of the most versatile pedals in this line, because it has the feeling of several different types of distortions. It makes me think of pedals like the classic MT10 Mostortion by Ibanez, but it also has the same sort of feeling as the Plexi Drive by Wampler, or even my JHS Charlie Brown. It does a really good job at sounding like an amp distortion because it has cascading stages, and I think it's a very realistic-sounding overdrive distortion as well. The tone and presence control are great, and it has a muscle switch and a tight switch, which helps you adjust the feel response and how it reacts with your guitar.

And then you have my favorite feature: this boost has a “more” knob. They called it “more” because loud is more good. I mean, I don't know that they meant to directly reference the JHS motto, but I like to think that they did. I’m 100% sure that they might have done this on purpose.

Fuzz

This next one is my favorite of the Teisco pedals; it's no shocker that I like it, because it’s based around the classic octave fuzz design. The Teisco Fuzz isn’t one of these newfangled digital octave fuzzes. Nope. It's old school. It's kinda like the Octavia or the Foxx Tone Machine, but it's been adjusted and modified. As a result, it has a really unique nature to it, even though it's obviously based around those classic circuits.

It has a better octave response, so it's more pronounced. You hear the octave when you're playing, and sometimes in the actual vintage units it's kind of hard to hear it tracking. Typically you have to have a lot of gain, some solid volume, but the Teisco Fuzz does a fantastic job working around that. I also liked the frequency response of this. I feel like it has more low end and a better high end that doesn't completely rip your face off. Let’s be honest, the most fun part of octave fuzz is how it almost rips your face and your audience's faces off, but not quite. This fuzz is very mellow and balanced in its attack.

I’d compare the Teisco Fuzz to a really chilled out zombie that’s chasing you at more of a jog than a run, who probably doesn’t even care about catching you and eating your brains. I can’t put it more clearly than that.

Four More Reasons to Love Teisco

I want to highlight a few more things about Teisco as a company that are slightly mind blowing, just because I can. Number one, the original founder of Teisco from the ’50s/’60s became a monk, like an actual monk. How cool is that? Do monks even play guitar? I guess they do now.

Monks also invented coffee, so can we give them a quick round of applause? Thank you.

Second, it's fascinating that these pedals are not painted in a traditional way. When I first saw them, I was really taken aback with how unique, how vibrant the colors were. They just looked incredible. I'd never seen anything like it; even the case design was unique, so there's definitely a process at work here. I had to figure out how Teisco was making this happen, so again I asked designer Ben to explain it. This is what he said: “The pedals aren't painted. It's kind of like water transfer, hydrographics, printing things, like literally each enclosure gets dipped into water and then the print gets transferred onto the enclosure. It's a lot of fun. That allows us to experiment with a lot of colors and a lot of patterns that…[are] not necessarily something that you always see in the world of pedals, but that's what it allowed us to do using hydrographic printing.

“Basically, we just wanted every single aspect of the pedal and of the product to remind people of what high school was like back in the day. You know, wacky colors. My favorite type of guitar was the Spectrum 5, the one with the multicolored switches and stuff. I guess that was us trying to bring that back and pay homage to all of that craziness.”

The number three amazing thing is that over the COVID shutdown, Teisco released an activity/coloring book. Seriously. This thing is legit, it’s fun, and they released it for free. You can download the PDF at their website here and teach your kids about pedals. It's pretty amazing.

And lastly, and I think most cool, is that Teisco was brought back to life by this incredible conglomerate called BandLab Technologies. Think of them as the Disney of guitar/music brands, and you’re pretty darn close. They basically own everything. And by everything, I mean everything. They are a collective of music focused brands, and they have brought back tons of vintage brands. They took on Mono in 2016, they added Heritage Guitars and Harmony Guitars, plus they own Guitar Magazine, Guitar.com, Music Tech, Uncut, and NME.

Honestly, this is like world domination level stuff. They're not playing around. At some point, they’ll probably own all music, period.

Seriously, though, I hope that you go and check out these Teisco pedals. They really are a breath of fresh air in an oversaturated pedal market. I love every one of these; this is definitely one of those articles where I can’t pick a favorite. You know how I am. It's fine.

Let me know in the comments what your favorite one was from this episode, and if you own one of the Teisco pedals, tell me all about it, how you use it, and where you first saw them.