I did a lot of research in the last few days. I am now absolutely certain that my Schaller TV 66/67 "Tonverzerrer" must have been made in the first months of production. This pedal is from 1966 or 1967! Apparently it has never been opened. It still contained the very first battery (non-leaking) and this one had no clip - it was directly soldered to the circuit. This user-unfriendly method cannot have been the standard procedure for a very long time. The potentiometers are from DRALOWID ("
Draht
lose
Widerstände", engl.: wireless resistors) in Berlin, a company that was closed in 1970. The Germanium transistors (labelled "A T E S AC192") are from the Italian company Ates Componenti Elettronici (not TES Tecnica Elettronica System as I thought at first).
Yesterday I tested the Tonverzerrer against a few of my fuzz pedals. Sound-wise it shares the most with the Keio (pre-KORG) Synthesizer Traveler, a huge pedal with wah-like treadle from 1973 that has fuzz, lowpass filter and a "singing" function. The fuzz of this Keio unit sounds very similar, but very noisy in comparison. The second closest match was the DingoTone CSF Classic Seventies Fuzz with silicon transistors, which is a tribute to the '70s Fuzz Face with silicon transistors.
So the Schaller Tonverzerrer is clearly a German variant of the Fuzz Face. It sounds more choppy and has less sustain, but it is significantly brighter and very gritty with a lot of bite. A very rough basic sound with the ability to easily produce deep and smashing heavy rock power chords. It has enormous amount of headroom. It gets really loud on demand, obviously to support the weak sounding pickups of the cheap guitars from that era. The noise performance is surprisingly good. Schaller offered a high-quality pedal with the TV 66/67.
The big switch doesn't really provide true bypass switching, although it looks as if it could route the input signal to the output without quality loss. But the basic guitar sound gets altered a lot without a buffered pedal in front or after it. It sound really "vintage" and somehow makes my Japanese Fender Stratocaster sound like a guitar from the early '70s. Well, I don't like that too much. But with a buffered pedal in the chain the guitar sound is normal again.
This early circuit doesn't handle the Fuzz Face-typical trick with the guitar's volume knob too well. It doesn't clean up as good. Later Schaller fuzzes with silicon transistors do, though. Maybe also the later revised versions with Germanium transistors that were made around 1969 until 1971. Actually I like my model the most with a buffered pedal in front. This way the
Intensität knob has a much wider operating range and the overall performance is better in my opinion: less distorted sounds can be achieved more easily, it increases the sustain and it handles the individual pickups better than with the guitar directly plugged into the input. Otherwise only the combinations of my single coils lead to good results.
This pedal is really, really good. Definitely a keeper! Not least because it is one of the very first European distortion pedals. I have never had an older piece of electrical music gear in my hands. This one stays with me for sure!
