Hi Ho Small White Box! It's The Burford Sonic Ranger!

It's always struck me as curious that a lot of players spend their lives searching the web/pawn shops/Help The Aged for old bits of kit that their heros used "back in the golden age", despite the facts that a lot of that kit was junk then and is hardly going to have been improved by a 40 year aging process and that said heroes long ago moved on to more modern equipment that actually works.

But plenty of people want to try the back-in-time approach and a whole industry has sprung up supplying these people with reproductions of all manner of improbable kit, which should at least work and can be obtained without spending hours delving through racks of moth-balled de-mob suits.



The subject of this post, the Burford Sonic Ranger, is a modern clone of the 1960s Dallas Rangemaster, a germanium-transistor based "treble booster" used by a whole host of luminaries and which is perhaps most famously known as part of the Beano Album sound. This particular Alan Exley designed unit also features switchable mid/bass boost, a modification used by Sabbath's Tony Iommi amongst others. The Sonic Ranger is hand-made in England and can be bought new on-line for a very reasonable £52.





Sound-wise this has the potential to be the king of overdrives. It's got real presence, balls, brilliance and a wonderful organic, singing quality. Switch the thing on and the guitar seems to come to life in your hands. But whilst you're noodling away in guitar-tone nirvana, take a peek at your sound engineer. He'll be the one tearing his hair out trying to figure out what to do with all that noise your Sonic Ranger is producing and wondering exactly what language the radio station it's picking up is in. To be fair, the background noise is, whilst considerable by modern standards, (a) probably authentic and (b) acceptable in a live environment in a rock/blues band or such. I daresay the radio reception is authentic too, but it is somewhat annoying, to say the least. Again, you'll probably get away with this live, and you can mitigate against its worst excesses by keeping the level control on the device away from its maximum.

So what do we have here? A quite magical-sounding little box with a couple of problems you might rather it didn't have. Years of "progress" have given us modern little boxes which don't have these problems, but to an observable extent our newer toys also lack that magic. It's horses for courses, and all that. If you're looking for some real 70s rock tone, warts and all, the Sonic Ranger could very well be just what you need. Go on, buy one!