Aclam The Mocker

THE VOX UL730 HIDDEN GEM

The Vox UL730 amp is not only a super rare amp, but also a piece of music history thanks to The Beatles, Joy Division and Led Zeppelin.

After restoring and analyzing the internal circuitry of our S/N: 3042 unit, we captured its beautiful tube saturation in the Dr. Robert. But the amp had much more to offer…

Although Vox included a built-in “distortion” circuit in the UL series, the resultant tone was primitive, closer to a fuzz than a regular distortion pedal from our times.

Moreover, compared to other UL’s, our unit fuzz tone was unique: kind of gated and spluttery. No other Vox UL offered alike tones because some components on our amp had degraded and misbiased the fuzz circuit.

We developed a prototype pedal to recreate that tone plus the non misbiased one after finding a small batch of the original clipping diodes Vox used in the UL series and the result was outstanding.

Thus, The Mocker was born: an extended version of the original Vox UL series fuzz circuit, ready to nail the tones from the ‘66s and ’67s era plus many more. A pedal that amazes for its versatility thanks to the Bias control, capable of landing on so musical terrains, from vintage to modern, by tweaking a single knob.

Inspired by the ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ album —whose eponymous song has a lead guitar intro, probably recorded with the UL fuzz— The Mocker owns a beautiful Hammerite finish, the same on most British fuzz boxes of those times, also used on the Vox UL series original footswitches. Nothing is made by chance in The Mocker.”