Review: Mosky Deluxe Preamp
By: Alex Lynham
Tags: Guitar, Pedal, Gear

TL;DR — A Timmy and boost at a bargain price

Rating — 9/10

RRP — £30

I’ve written before about how the Paul Cochrane Timmy is my favourite drive pedal in the Tubescreamer family tree. It’s uncompressed, open-sounding, and has a highly usable gain range, especially if, like me, you run it into a tube amp. For distortion tones I’m more in the metal or fuzz camp, favouring an Amptweaker Tight Rock or Tight Metal for saturated distortion tones, or an op-amp Big Muff for fuzz tones. Latterly I’ve found that, although the op-amp Big Muff records well, my Transmission Killer distortion does a decent enough impersonation of it that I tend to use that live instead.

Although the MXR Timmy is now set to make the Timmy a lot easier to get hold of in the UK, until recently your best bet was — sadly — probably a clone, with the Caline Pure Sky and Mosky MM Silver being the two most popular choices. I’ve got a few friends that have original Timmys, but on the whole, the MM Silver seems to be the more popular choice, a fact that may have something to do with its circa £20 price tag.

So, when I discovered that,

a) The Lovepedal Amp 11 is a Timmy clone

b) Mosky do an Amp 11 clone

I suppose it meant I had to check one out. Now, the Mosky pedal I had in mind was the Amp Turbo — which looks visually basically identical to the Lovepedal. However, I also turned up this, the Deluxe Preamp. Having built a Timmy clone from a kit, I instantly wondered whether the two switches on the left were equivalent to the DIP switches found on some Timmy models. Meanwhile, the toggle on the right suggested that the boost in this circuit was not an Electra — as on the Lovepedal original, but something else.

NB — after a reader helpfully took theirs apart, it seems this isn’t an SHO and the sticker is an odd red herring. Until I actually bother to take mine apart and trace it properly, it looks like it could be an Electra after all, or an AMZ booster. I’m leaving these paragraphs in because hey, we’re all wrong sometimes.

When I unboxed it, I saw that on the reverse, Mosky have placed a sticker that says “crackle okay”, which I suppose answers the question of what exactly the boost is. For the uninitiated, the original Z-Vex Super Hard On Boost often had art thatreferenced the crackle you get when turning its sole control (created as a result of the pot re-biasing the MOSFET). On many units, the pot is still marked “crackle okay.” At a guess, the switch simply removes the zener diode from the circuit, but I’m not 100% sure.

I’m a fan of MOSFET and JFET based drives since finally cracking and getting my hands on a smallsound/bigsound Mini, and I can report that the boost side of this pedal is deceptively powerful, driving my 5W test amp very nicely into warm saturation.

Over on the other side, the drive instantly barked into life as a Timmy-style drive. It’s open, a little noisy, has plenty of gain, and cleans up to the point of almost being usable as a clean boost. With the toggle switches flicked over, the level of compression jumps up, and the amount of volume on tap feels lessened. They sound to me like additional soft-clipping diodes, which again, would make sense if they’re like the DIP switches on a Timmy.

It’s also worth noting that while on the original pedal, the Bass and Treble controls were both cuts, on this, they operate more as you’d expect, with clockwise turns heading toward maximum — that is, no filtering, and anti-clockwise being a cut.

On its own, the drive side has more than enough punch and clipping — especially with the extra diodes in — to function as indended with a solid-state amp, but it’s obviously with a tube amp that it shines, pulling some hair and saturation sympathetically out of the tubes. For my money, the best sounds were with the gain pulled back a bit, volume up, and the boost used to kick it off the cliff edge, driving both the Timmy and the amp into lead breakup.

My test amp isn’t a high-gain amp, but I’m looking forward to playing this through other amps that have a more metallic tone, and I strongly suspect that the combination of its tiny form-factor and integrated boost will mean it goes on my board, and then stays there.