Mr. Deaky - Electric guitar pedal - Deacy Amp, Distortion

Mr. Deaky is a tribute to the most famous mini amplifier in the world: the Deacy Amp. Its history goes back to the early 1970s, when John Deacon, Queen bassman, electronic engineer and brilliant mind, recovered pieces of a broken transistor radio to build an amp for his guitarist Brian May for studio purpose.

According to the facts, John Deacon modified the hi-fi circuitry while keeping the power amp stage unchanged, equipped with two germanium transistors used as drivers. This little amplifier delivered about half a watt of power. The power supply was strictly battery operated (no longer easily available nowadays). Queen guitarist Brian May has recorded more parts than we can imagine, in the 70s there are more solos and orchestrations recorded with this mini amplifier than with his historic Vox AC30.

Mr. Deaky’s mission is to reproduce the basic concept and tone of this little gem, but a totally varied components to be connected like a normal pedal drive unit.

The best results are obtained by placing a treble booster before Mr. Deaky.

The unit has two simple controls:

• Level: set the amount of distorted signal to be sent to the amplifier
• Dampen: is a low-pass filter that recreates the muted effect that Brian May recreated in studio work by placing books in front of Deacy Amp.

Mr. Deaky offers the best response connected to a guitar amp set in clean mode, by the way, as Deacy Amp is in fact a full-range amplifier, interesting results can be obtained by connecting it directly to the mixing desk or to the DAW by simply increasing dampen control to eliminate the unnecessary high frequencies.