Gizmo Alert: Fryette Valvulator I
By Matt Blackett

I have plenty of clean gear—hum-canceling pickups, high-end amps, and rack effects connected with state-of the-art cable. But for some reason, my favorite rig is still my tired, noisy pedalboard. Consisting of six ratty old pedals with nary a true bypass in sight, it’s heavy on vibe, but also heavy on tone sucking and noise. This is where the Fryette Valvulator comes to the rescue. Designed to eliminate noise, drive lots of cable, and improve your sound in the process, the Valvulator is a tube-driven, buffered preamp that can also supply power to up to eight effects.

When I plugged into the rugged, stainless-steel box, and then into my pedalboard, the ever-present hum was gone. Gone. And I was still using the old power supplies! When I used the Valvulator’s isolated DC outputs to power my pedals, the sound got even cleaner. This was particularly helpful to my Korg ToneWorks delay, which had obviously never gotten enough juice from the pedalboard’s built-in power supply.

But the tone wasn’t just quieter with the Valvulator in line—my effects sounded fuller and punchier, with better highs and more coherent lows. How does Fryette accomplish these feats? Well, the device’s 12AX7 is slammed with high voltage, so plugging into the Valvulator is like plugging into the front end of a good tube amp—before you ever hit a pedal. The signal is then converted to low impedence, which eliminates the loading that occurs when multiple pedals are chained together.

To see how effective the Valvulator was at driving long cable lengths, I strung together eight stompboxes with 80 feet of cable. Without the Valvulator, the tone had an indistinct top end accompanied by a faint squealing noise. I also noticed that my tone suffered horribly when I rolled my volume down—I lost even more treble and wildly increased audible hum. However, when I plugged into the Valvulator, the top end came back, the squeal went away, and my tone sounded glorious throughout the entire range of the volume pot.

Fryette recommends using the Valvulator’s second output to feed a tuner, but I couldn’t bear to waste a signal this cool on a tuner. I ran the output to another amp for a stereo rig with none of the signal loss that typically occurs when using a Y cable. I also found that plugging into the Valvulator before recording into a Roland VS-880 gave the 880’s internal amp simulations more body and warmth. It also improved the sound of direct-recorded bass and keyboards, and I even liked what it did to an old drum machine. The Valvulator is definitely the closest thing to a “magic box” that I’ve heard in a long time.