Studio engineer built fuzz pedal that gave the world Satisfaction
Studio engineer b May 4, 1922 d May 21, 2018
Glenn Snoddy, who has died aged 96, was a Nashville 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.
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’ 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 they had stumbled on something new.
In 2013, Snoddy told Vintage
Guitar magazine: ‘‘No one else used [the fuzz-toned transformer] to my knowledge. Nancy Sinatra came to town and wanted to use that sound, and I had to tell her people that we didn’t have it any more because the amplifier completely quit. So I had to get busy and conjure some other way to make it happen."
He took apart the transformer and built a foot-operated pedal to duplicate the sound. The Gibson company marketed the pedal, dubbed the Maestro Fuzz-Tone FZ1. Gibson’s ad campaign improbably said the device would make guitars sound like saxophones and orchestra strings.
In 1965, the Rolling Stones experimented through many sessions with Satisfaction, but nothing seemed to capture the right tone. Richards tried acoustic guitar, but it fell flat. No-one liked his suggestion of a horn section on the song’s memorable riff. According to London’s
Independent, pianist Ian Stewart, the often-uncredited sixth Stone, left the room and returned an hour later, handing Richards a Maestro Fuzz-Tone and said, ‘‘Try this.’’
Richards’ use of Snoddy’s invention gave the riff an aggression perfectly suited to the song’s confrontational lyrics and helped popularise 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 up the volume 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 guitarist Link Wray, who used distortion to
menacing effect on his 1958 hit Rumble.
‘‘But fuzz was different from those tube-driven sounds,’’ author William Weir wrote in the Atlantic
Monthly. ‘‘Transistors boosted and then severely clipped the guitar’s signal, creating a buzzy, not-quite of-this-world timbre. It sounded kind of synthetic, and far from warm or earthy.’’
And for guitarists, another advantage to the pedal was getting a dirty sound reliably without damaging the amplifier’s speakers.
Snoddy’s Maestro fuzz pedal ultimately led to a cottage industry of guitar-effect pedals. Later distortion and fuzz devices have all competed for the fledging hard-rock guitarist’s wallet.
Glenn Thomas Snoddy was born in Shelbyville, Tennessee. His mother was a homemaker, and his father, who died when Glenn was
12, was a postal carrier and served as the song leader at his local church. Snoddy studied trombone and piano at an early age but became an engineer after serving as an army radio technician in the Pacific during World War II.
He moved to Nashville in the late 1940s, and in the following decade engineered many Grand Ole
Opry shows for Nashville radio and television station WSM.
In the early 1960s, he became a chief engineer at Owen Bradley’s Quonset Hut studio, where he created one of the first stereo recording consoles in Nashville and mixed Johnny Cash’s Ring of
Fire (1963). He also hired a janitor and fledgling songwriter from Texas who pestered studio clients to audition his compositions; his name was Kris Kristofferson.
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.
He sold his share of the studio in
1980, but continued to run the mixing board for another decade.
His wife of 69 years, Sara Fite Snoddy, died in 2017. Survivors include three children, four grandsons, and a greatgranddaughter. –