the shin-ei / companion FY-2 is a simple piece of equipment really. one look at it, you’d think it was an amplifier footswitch. i hooked my xingxiao strat to it and played it through the marshall combo. the first thing i actually did was to switch it off. true bypass was what i heard. truly amazing – i told you this was a simple piece of gear. the FY-2 has only two knobs – volume and fuzz. rolling the fuzz down to 50% with the marshall on clean gave you a lovely buzzsaw tone. not really good with chords, the most you could do would be 5th chords without the octave note played. at 100%, the FY-2 is all bumblebee, lalat and stihl chainsaw rolled into one.

next up was hooking the jazz bass to the FY-2, playing it through the behringer half-stack. no prizes for guessing which tune i played first. i had to roll off the bass and low-mids to 50% and switch the BX3000T on to bright. spot on. one thing i noticed, if i had the bass on more than 50% the open E would simply… err… ululate. pijoe tried it for size playing muse’s hysteria. i’ll be damned if i don’t start learning to play a few of their tunes.

is this stompbox worth it? for a little over £100 may be too much but this is a near-mint piece of gear from the early 1970’s. heck, some idiot even bought a shittier and run-down FY-6 for £190!!! for collectors and kiasu kings like me, it was worth every penny.

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to see/hear the FY-2 in action, click here.