Engineer who pioneered guitar “fuzz tone” 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 fuzz-toned 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 Fuzz-Tone 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’ 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.

In 1967, Snoddy repurposed an old movie complex in East Nashville into Woodland Studios. The studio produced hits including the Charlie Daniels Band’s “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” (1979), the Oak Ridge Boys’ “Elvira” (1981), Kansas’ “Dust In the Wind” (1978) and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s Grammy Award-winning 1972 album “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.” Snoddy sold his share of the studio in 1980 but continued to run the mixing board for another decade.