I have 3 fuzz pedals and a boss bass overdrive on my board. Little big muff, mxr 108 silicon fuzz and an Algal Bloom fuzz.
All of them are great, but behave and destroy things differently. Favorite is the little big muff, a friend gave it and running my guitars through it takes me back to the wiredless ninetees!
Yeah, get a big muff, any edition or series, it’s a fun fuzz.
Most people do but don’t realize it, because most fancy boutique fuzz pedals are slightly modified fuzz face circuits (and most of the rest are modified Tone Benders or Big Muffs being erroneously called fuzz even though they’re clipping diode base distortion and not fuzz at all).
The Fuzz Factory, for example, is essentially a Fuzz Face and an EHX LPB-1 in series with some of the resistors replaced with pots.
I liked the older Devi Ever pedals I’ve tried a lot - nice, distinctive sounds, well built and fair, no-hype prices. The SM Fuzz was my go-to in the days when I was playing bass in bands a lot, and it was good on guitar, too. Haven’t tried any of them since 2008 or so, though.
The Superbadass Variac Fuzz (SVF) arrived last night.
Here are my first impressions. One big caveat, I had to play at night so this was some low-output tele, SVF-into-SansAmp, transistor-on-transistor action. I’ll try again later this week with my old 70s vibrochamp and my other guitars to see how the pedal reacts to tubes and different pickups.
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Very different from the EQD Dirt Transmitter pedal I used to have. They are both silicon transistor fuzz pedals with a bias knob, but the similarities stop there.
Despite its description as a modified Band of Gypsys fuzz, I don’t really hear those tones. I’m no purist or expert, but I did go back and listen to some tunes from Band of Gypsys, Live at Berkeley, and Live at the Fillmore East to refresh my memory.
All of the demos from MXR were mainly Stoner/Doom/Desert Rock-oriented and now I know why. This sounds to me like Kyuss-in-a-box.
This is a very ballsy, heavy, and aggressive sounding fuzz. I was sort of hoping for something that could do lower-gain, blusey tones, but this is not that pedal. It’s almost like a cross between a medium/heavy OD and a fuzz to my ears. Even with the gain all the way down you are in medium-to-high gain OD territory, and I was testing it with very low output tele pickups.
This does not seem to do the super spitty sound that made the EQD pedal great, especially at the low gain settings. At high gain settings, it does get almost synth like, so the bias knob can be interesting, just not what I was envisioning.
The other thing is that this cleans up almost immediately when you start to roll the volume off. On the plus side, this is much more clean up than I had on the other silicon fuzzes I have owned. On the negative side, on the germanium fuzzes I have owned, some of my favorite sounds were in-between sounds on the volume knob. With this pedal, there is almost no in-between tone, it’s pretty much heavy fuzz or clean up.
All said and done, this is not the sound I was looking to replace, but that does not mean it’s a bad pedal. I have owned some terrible sounding fuzz pedals, but this is not one of them. It is very musical, and sounds pleasing at pretty much all of the settings, but it IS heavy. Also, while it’s heavy, it’s not heavy in that Muff-kind-of-wall-of-sound heavy. It has great clarity, so good for chords and lead work. The tone knob is a great addition as well. With everything at noon, it all sounds great, but when you dial back the bias or mess with the gain, it can get pretty muffled. The tone knob is a nice way to add back in some of that high end. My first impression is that I like the bias knob set straight up or slightly off center more than I do the extreme settings, which is a bit unfortunate. I was hoping the really low bias sounds would give me the sound I was after.
Bring on the AnalogMan pedal.
I love all the recent mentions of guitars here on the forum, it’s like we’re having a guitar revival. 
I can get all sorts of tones and fuzzes straight from my Trace Elliot Bonneville combo amp. It has a reconfigurable preamp that can use 3, 4, or 5 valve stages. All together it has 8 tubes and the preamp switch adds or removes them from the signal path. There’s a lot of controls affecting eq and it has adjustable output damping which can allow the speaker cabinets own impedance/frequency curve to be superimposed onto the overall sound which produces more harmonics. You can trick it to compress itself using the controls it has for the fx loop.
It’s a really wild amp, you can all sorts of tones with it and if you crank the thing it’s an absolute beast that just sings with harmonics if you turn towards it for feedback… And it’s green. 
There’s only 400 of these out there, and right now there’s one on Reverb for $400 which is an absolute steal if it’s working correctly…
It was the head of Trace Elliot’s last design hand made in their small shop in England before the company was bought out by Gibson and the shop shut down… I absolutely love it, I’ll keep mine forever…
Oh man, that amp looks like a gem. A bit too much power for my space in Tokyo. I’m jealous. I am always on the look out for low-wattage options, but have pretty much found my ideal tone in a 70s silverface Vibrochamp with an outboard Fender reverb tank. I want to eventually add a tape echo unit, but the El Cap is a nice stand-in for now.
One thing I really like on fuzz like FEA Labs’ Photon Fuzz is the blend button. As fuzz tends to destroy the low end, it’s convenient when used on bass guitar or synth to be able to mix some dry signal with the distorted one.
Sweetspots. I don’t know. I route all kinds of audio through it, mostly monosynths (A4). I guess to me it’s just funspots and it got tons of funspots for weird mono synth sounds. Crunch and f**k the sound up good. I love it. I EQ a lot inside DAW both before and after pedals. Just experimenting, playing, meditating and having fun. Nothing serious. Not so much guitar and amp for me. I sing in a band “Det skandaløse orkester” and play guitar on some songs, but i mostly run the guitar straight into the amp clean. Sometimes I use the cheap Joyo voodo octave. Its an ok pedal for the road and for that one song I play a hellish loud solo.
Yes, I agree. Blend or mix knob is important. That’s why I patch pedals in aux send/return on my mixer or route it in a similar way in a daw and audio interface. Blend is a must.
Totally. I love dialing in the blend on my Darkglass B7K. Don’t know if anyone has checked out their Duality fuzz pedal, but it has two discrete fuzz circuits, a blend between the two, and a wet/dry blend.
I use a combination of the RML Fuzz, Hyde Distortion Filter and Analog Heat. Really after I started using the RML i didnt feel the need for any other fuzz. The only problem is that it’s mono so the heat still has a role in my rig.
White Atom. Functions as a great overdrive also.
I love J Rockett’s WTF pedal - a combination overdrive and fuzz. It has an amazing range of coloration. It incorporates a circuit design by Paul Trombetta. I’ve lent it to a master guitarist here in Houston who is very, very selective about fuzz and he feels it to be one of the very best.
On the crazy side, Fairfield Circuitry’s Uncertain Surprise certainly is…
But if you can ever get your hands on a Tornita (or other) by Paul Trombetta Designs, jump on it…
Just bought a Lastgasp Art Laboratories – Cyber Psychic for my 808 clone and other drum machines, looking at Old Blood Alpha Haunt and MAW for later purchases.
Fuzz heads- Since most boutique circuits are mods of standards, is there a good way i can get a smattering of components that’d be fun to madscience with? I’ve made plenty of things from BOMs but i’d like a bit more play to breadboard, like a hipster Tandy set 
Yyyyyyyyep. I started this company a while back
I’m a big fan of our Necromancer and Great Destroyer on electronics.
DOD buzzbox 
@Aen: Oh hey! I have a DIY TDG <3
Will look into the Necromancer.
Any super quick tips for buying an assortment of components to cobble together while learning?
Schaller Fuzz from 1967. Beautiful. everything about it is nice… the shape. the wiring, the finish, engraving. sounds gnarly… you can see the wooly squares coming out of yer amp!
You can go a long way with 2n5088 transistors, some capacitors around .1uf and assorted resistors. The 2n5088 is a building block for a lot of gain based effects, including muffs, SheFuzz, and even clean boosts.
A kit might be your best bet.
Reading a schematic can be tough, I can’t find the illustration that got me going, but the “linear power booster” project will get you on the right track. If you do get into it you’ll probably have to fight pretty hard, but once it clicks, you’re off to the races, as far as gain goes.
Mega thanks! I work much better with homework 
Just that ought to give me a basic structure.
So Aen, i saw the announcement at your web-site that Dwarfcraft Devices is moving on. A good new / bad news sort of thing but it sounds like it is mostly a good news one. Altogether not and bad go, and now you’re both on to new things. Good to you all.