Audio Kitchen Fake Plastic Trees

This is the Audio Kitchen Fake Plastic Trees. It looks like it was home cooked and hand painted – but having seen different versions of this pedal I must say that the design is either printed on or the Audio Kitchen has a Chef with a very steady hand, because they all look identical.
The Audio Kitchen specializes in tube driven dishes, from simple boost pedals up to full amps and the Fake Plastic Trees is the only thing on the menu that comes without tubes.

Looking inside explains the height of the enclosure: There are some tall components on the pcb.

To quote the Audio Kitchen website on the contents of the pedal:
Class A, hand-graded JFETs, a discrete stage modelling the EL84 grid-clipping profile, a custom Mumetal output transformer, TBT speaker load, and a Class A line driver.

So I think of it as a micro amp that does drive a dummy load (instead of a cabinet) and you get the sound from the output transformer. At least that’s what my layman’s understanding of those things suggests.

The knob layout does not reflect the internal sequence of things – the EQ section comes before the gain/clipping stage.

So how does it sound and how does it feel?

Given that Audio Kitchen bases all their work around tubes and this is the only solid state pedal, the name Fake Plastic Trees is aptly chosen.

I want to say the Fake Plastic Trees sounds and feels like something organic that mimics being something plastic that mimics being something organic, even though from the tube enthusiasts viewpoint, it merely is something plastic that mimics something organic.

The Volume knob is self explanatory. The gain, branch and root will interact with each other.
In my setup, setting all three to noon is not particularly spectacular. The sound remains clean and while it feels and sounds a little different, it’s not really worth mentioning. When you leave the gain as is, but dime the EQ, you get dirt.
When you leave the EQ at noon and raise the gain, you also get dirt,
but a slightly different flavour because you don’t have scooped mids now. This invites tinkering around.

When you try and use this pedal as a low gain overdrive, you will find that it can be touch sensitive.
You know those pedals where the lows stay mostly clear and the highs already start singing?
And their counterparts where the lows get a bit of grind while the top stays rather clean?
Well, the FPT can do either, just boost the treble when you want upper registers breaking up and boost the bass for a dirty low end – boost neither for flat response and cut a bit of both for bringing out the mids in the dirt making process.

The vibe that comes across is that of a small amp pushed to 110% of what it’s capable of.
What sticks out is a formidable note separation when playing double stops or power chords, and what feels a bit different to traditional overdrive circuits is how it clears up on the note decay.

If I’m honest, the way this pedal overdrives the signal is what I would have expected the JHS Colour Box to do.
There are components in the tone that sound like you’re forcing something past what it is capable of, but also components showing that this is intended.
Raising gain, branch and root will get you more into synth territory. You can dial in a very driven, very smooth sound that clearly identifies as fuzz. When you dime everything, you get a strong compression and tons of drive; A sound that makes you think “I could use this in a synth chain without an octaver”.
Once more, the decay is interesting. Where a fuzz pedal set to “face melting” often needs a gate because the note decay becomes a sputtering mess (not without a certain brutality), the FPT will fade into clean notes in a very linear fashion, which feels different from anything I’ve used before.

With the pedal (mostly) clean, but the branch knob turned up for a treble boost, there is that little something in your tone that you can’t really place, but when you switch the pedal off, the tone becomes bland and loses a bit of life it had before.

I have the JPTR FX Jive on my board. It lives behind the comp and I set it to give me the maximum amount of saturation without actual distortion.
For want of better words, I’d describe it as this: The attack of a note, the “Thud” remains unchanged, but there is something living behind the note that becomes apparent when you let it ring, even for the shortest amount of time – just when the initial thud is done, it comes out.
With the FPT set to the mildest of drives, playing into the comp and then the Jive, that thing behind the note suddenly becomes huge.

When you read up on Audio Kitchen and how the pedal was created – it is done by people who use tubes (or valves, since they are Bri’ish) for everything, who sat down and tried to emulate tube valve sounds with solid state technology, and the FPT is how close they have gotten.

To my ear, the whole breakup is very solid state sounding – as I said, the FPT delivers the kind of dirt I would have wanted from the Colour Box. However, It’s not tube-like in the way it sounds.
There’s more to a pedal than mere sound, though. The interaction between your fingers and your ears is something special here. It gives you a feeling of playing an amp that is pushed too hard for comfort. Back off a wee bit and we snap back into comfy territory, and while many pedals can easily do this, they all feel a bit different under your fingers. The FPT somehow is addictive in that regard.
I’ve had it in a chain with the Wampler Pantheon and the Hamstead Subspace yesterday. I dialed around on the sounds. The other pedals offered a bigger bass response, they offered pearly highs and … more HiFi.
Yet I kept going back to the FPT because of how the interaction of my plucking fingers and the breakup of the pedal felt. It was just right, but on top of that it was somewhat different to …. basically anything I played before. In a way, the Audio Kitchen managed to get the feel of a tube amp. They captured the intricate going-ons between your ears and your fingertips. Instead of making yet another pedal that claims to sound exactly like a tube driven amp, they made a pedal that feels exactly like a tube driven amp. It is hard to describe, but very easy to experience. Just get one and try for yourself.

The other day I was standing around in our living space, playing stupid pop songs on my Ubass to annoy (and entertain) the SO. In German, there is a term called “Ohrwurm” which translates to ear worm. It describes a catchy tone that gets stuck in your head and you cannot get rid of it for some time. I was trying to wedge as many ear worms into her as I could possibly fit, when I was suddenly and brutally overcome by the urge to play 90’s Swedish Doom Metal.
You might know how good I am at resisting temptation, so I swapped the Ubass for a full grown one and sat down in the den to make some noise.

A bit of experimentation got me not even close to the tone I wanted – I was feeding the Wampler Pantheon Deluxe into the Fuzzrocious BDPG at that time. If you go for a fat&grindy sound that sits well with stoner/sludge/doom, try feeding dirt into the BDPG. It gets you places.
However, with the Wampler, I was not feeling it. The sweet spots on either side of the pedal were using less gain than I needed and even combining them did not work out as I would have liked.
At that point, I kicked in the Fake Plastic Trees.

Holy Cow.

Imagine a super mean and spluttery fuzz. Now take off some of the searing top end and add so much booty it’s hard to believe. I knew you could make fuzz circuits sound totally kaputt. But usually, when you maim and mangle this hard, the low end suffers a great deal. The FPT somehow gets both done in a pleasant way.
It kind of feels like a very friendly sound, like melting happy smiley faces, and your bottom end does not drop out one bit.

While most pedals at these settings sound like you’re doing something quite brutal, something that requires white face paint, a pentagram necklace and black leather, the FPT sounds like it actually likes it and could even take a lot more.

Honestly, if you’re experimenting with bass sounds, get this pedal.

At the other end of the sonic spectrum (opposed to 90’s doom metal), I used the FPT on a jam session.
Dub music was the topic. The FPT set to solid, artificial sizzle played into the BDPG got me a warm and super fat synth like sound with all the glory, but none of the usual restrictions (that come into play when you break out the OC-2 and have to play so it tracks). The way the pedal clears up on note decay sounds a bit like an envelope low pass in a mix, and it is very easy to set and control. I used that effect sparingly, but when I did, people were cracking smiles and bobbing their heads.

Following that evening, I invested some time to further investigate the Tube-Amp claim of theirs.
I do admit that I found it a bit hilarious at first.
The FPT in the demos sounds a bit unique, like a very special farty drive that can do a few interesting tones.
Those tones from the demo were surprisingly easy to recreate at home, and they really did sound like the demo.
Now, careful toying around with both gain and branch (treble) got me into a territory that really is the zone of a not-yet-fully-stressed-but-definitely-slightly-irritated preamp tube. What I want to stress yet again is how it feels in combination with how it sounds.
I ran the Beta V, the SS/BS Mini, the Spaceman Saturn VI, Wampler Belle and Wampler Pantheon Deluxe into the board and twisted a lot of knobs to find the perfect spot. However, there was something lacking, something I could not put my finger on. Every single time I switched back to FPT, it was there again.

It might just be a mad love-at-first-sight affair of mine, but all the aforementioned pedals sounded boring, bland and kind of all the same to my ears and felt numb to my fingers, when clicking the FPT into the signal chain was a spark of joy.

If you look at the price, it seems expensive. However, what you’re getting here is something that cannot be found in most other pedals. In terms of utility, I want to say the Fake Plastic Trees rivals the 3Leaf Audio Doom2, although they are two very different pedals. Both can get you low gain sounds that work fantastic in a mix. Both can give you a solid foundation to craft super fat synth bass sounds.
The 3Leaf Doom2 has more knobs and lets you adjust a bit finer, but the FPT with its simple gain/bass/treble layout is incredibly useful and incredibly easy to dial into any mix.

I cannot recommend this pedal warmly enough.

Chef’s Kiss