Shootout: Fuzz Pedals

ALEX LYNHAM.

Along with overdrive and distortion, fuzz is by far the most common electric guitar effect – and also one of the most diverse – and in this best fuzz pedals guide we’re going to help you find the right one for the sound you’re after.

The first fuzzes were created and used early in the history of rock n’ roll, unlike say, delay, which didn’t appear in earnest until the ‘70s. These fuzzes were often home-brewed or erratic concoctions, designed for pure noise, and it was a while before more stable designs like the Big Muff, Tonebender and Fuzz Face appeared – although the early Fuzz Faces were notorious for variation between units.

It’s for this reason that Jimi Hendrix bought them by the bucketload, carefully auditioning each pedal until he found the one that suited his sound. They’re not for everyone, but if what you want is some rock gnar, then look no further than a fuzz.

WHAT IS THE BEST FUZZ PEDAL?

With its balance of seriously gnarly fuzz on tap, as well as the ability to be dialled back to suit many styles of playing, the Big Muff has to be our recommendation – doubly so as it’s pretty affordable for most players. Specifically, though, we are big fans of the op-amp reissue, which until recently was only available via boutique builders, DIY kits, or trading your right arm for an original. This is the best fuzz pedal for that classic Smashing Pumpkins sound and beyond.

If you want to get wilder, then the original madcap fuzz is probably what you seek. Used by Robert Fripp, Matt Bellamy, Rivers Cuomo, Buckethead, Stephen Carpenter, Trent Reznor, St. Vincent, Jack White and J. Mascis, you’re in good company with the ZVex Fuzz Factory on your pedalboard. The controls may not really describe what they do, and yes, it might sometimes pick up radio transmissions, but that’s all part of the charm of this insane, inspirationally weird fuzz. Your playing will never be the same again.

BUYING ADVICE

Where an overdrive or distortion pedal generally works by amplifying the guitar signal using an op-amp and then applying either soft clipping, like a Tube Screamer, or hard clipping, like a ProCo RAT, a fuzz pedal usually works by either mis-biasing transistors or amplifying them so much that they clip.

Of course, there’s some crossover. The original ProCo RAT’s signature clipping sound was largely its LM308 op-amp being driven into nearly triangle-wave clipping. The fact it had hard clipping diodes after the amp stage was more important to the later models that used a different op-amp.

On the other side, the Electro-Harmonix Big

Muff gets its signature sound mainly due to two soft-clipping amplification stages, which in terms of topology makes it closer to a drive, even as its square-wave signal screams, “Fuzz!”

A lot of things change the tone of a fuzz. There’s the obvious stuff, like the EQ profile of any components in the signal path, and whether there’s an EQ control on the pedal itself. The type of transistors used matters too, with germanium transistors being heat-sensitive, unpredictable, ‘warm’, ‘wooly’ and ‘spluttery’, while silicon transistors are more predictable in massmanufacture, but a bit ‘colder’ and ‘sharper’.

Finally, there’s the intent of a fuzz to consider – is it supposed to sound smooth, or like a hole being torn in a partition wall? Where an op-amp based circuit tends to have a limited number of designs that will work, transistors are more lenient – at least in the sense that they will often make noise in unpredictable ways even when not used in the way the manufacturers intended.

This makes fuzz a uniquely accessible area of pedal design, and it’s where most boutique builders got their start, from the noisemakers at Death By Audio to the digital whizzes at Old Blood Noise Endeavors.