Glenn Snoddy, Nashville engineer who brought ‘fuzz tone’ to rock, dies at 96

Glenn Snoddy, a Nashville, Tennessee studio engineer who built a pedal that enabled guitarists to create the snarling “fuzz tone,” unleashing sonic distortion possibilities that influenced generations of rock guitarists, died May 21 at his home in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. He was 96.

The cause was congestive heart failure, said his daughter Dianne Mayo.

Whenever you hear guitar distortion on a heavy metal or punk rock record, or the feral guitar of Keith Richards on the Rolling Stones’ 1965 signature hit, (“I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” you’re listening to the legacy of Snoddy, whose device allowed guitarists to go from clean to dirty picking at the tap of a foot.

The fuzz effect was first heard — by accident — on country singer Marty Robbins’s 1961 record “Don’t Worry.”

During the recording session, guitarist Grady Martin’s six-string bass guitar was being run through a console with a defective transformer. The distorted and almost flatulent sound initially annoyed Snoddy, and he requested a redo. Martin, producer Don Law and the other musicians convinced him that they had stumbled on something new.

“No one else used [the fuzztoned transformer] to my knowledge,” Snoddy told Vintage Guitar magazine in 2013. “Nancy Sinatra came to town and wanted to use that sound, and I had to tell her people that we didn’t have it anymore because the amplifier completely quit. So I had to get busy and conjure some other way to make it happen.”

Snoddy took apart the bad transformer and built a foot-operated pedal to duplicate the sound. The Gibson company marketed the pedal, dubbed the Maestro FuzzTone FZ-1. Gibson’s ad campaign improbably said the device would make guitars sound like saxophones and orchestra strings.

When the Stones recorded “Satisfaction,” Richards’s use of Snoddy’s invention gave the song’s riff an aggression perfectly suited to the song’s confrontational lyrics and helped popularize the band — and the fuzz tone — on both sides of the Atlantic.

Guitar distortion had been around almost as long as the electric guitar. In the early 1950s, guitarist Willie Johnson played “dirty” guitar with blues singer Howlin’ Wolf by simply turning the volume knob up on his amp and letting the speakers suffer from overheated tubes. The 1951 Jackie Brenston/Ike Turner proto-rock-and-roll hit “Rocket 88” featured guitarist Willie Kizart, who reportedly poked a hole in his amp speaker to get a distorted sound. So did Washington guitarist Link Wray, who used distortion to menacing effect on his 1958 hit “Rumble.”