Help me find a fuzz?

Fuzz pedals are a bit of a blank spot in my knowledge so I'm not exactly sure where to start because I'm not even sure if I want Silicon or Germanium but I would guess it's Germanium.

The two main things I want it for are for those funky, bluesy, fuzzy overdriven hendrix-esque tones and also to layer with an overdrive pedal to get a stupidly fat wall of noise which I don't want to have lots of clarity but I don't want it too be really saturated sounding either, if that makes any sense to anyone?

I'd also like to use it for weird, saturated sounding solos but this isn't really a concern when selecting which one to go for.

Ideally I wouldn't really like to spend more than £70 but I will be using eBay however maybe a clone would be a better route to go down?

I like the look of the Zvex fuzz factory because it looks like it could be quite versatile however it is a bit over what I wanted to spend.

Definitely, some kind of fuzz face.

The Fuzz Factory is only pseudo-versatile. It can make a lot of over the top tones, but it always sounds like a Fuzz Factory at its core. Once you hear it, you will always be able to recognize one.

I would agree that a Fuzz Face (or clone) is probably a bit more in line with Hendrix sound. He used geranium circuits early on and silicon in the later period. Personally, I prefer the latter for both tone and ease of use. Geranium can be fussy and I have no time for that. There are a thousand and two clones based on both types of circuits and they all fall within the proper tonal spectrum. Just grab one that has the vibe you are looking for... (And honestly, there is nothing wrong with keeping things cheap and just grabbing a Dunlop/MXR).

let's keep this thread going, i have the exact same questions

Me too...I was thinking of the VS Angry Fuzz...I like the ability to have the octave or not. I just don't know much at all about fuzz. I had a Big Muff back in the 80's but really found it to be more of a distortion. My latest fuzz was a Guyatone TZ-2 which was spitty with a hint of octave...fun, but not very useful. There's probably one out there for me.

There is also the Wampler Leviathan fuzz. It gets killer reviews, but I haven't used on personally. There is a killer deal on one over at:

http://www.sevenstring.org/forum/gear-sale-trade-wanted/201182-wampler-leviathan-fuzz-pedal.html

I don't know the guy selling it, but the price is right! That said, I'll just keep using my lowly old MXR Blue Box when I need a bit of fuzz love.

I am more of an overdrive whore but I have been tempted lately by the MXR Classic 108.

I have an MXR Blue Box, wouldn't recommend it because of it's limitations,
just my opinion.

I get a pretty nice variety of fuzzes from my Fuzz Factory, but I wouldn't recommend it as a 1st fuzz or to someone new to fuzz.

I agree with the Fuzz Face suggestions. However, definitely try silicon vs. germanium before you decide. Germanium is great, but it is temperamental

I get a pretty nice variety of fuzzes from my Fuzz Factory, but I wouldn't recommend it as a 1st fuzz or to someone new to fuzz.

I agree with the Fuzz Face suggestions. However, definitely try silicon vs. germanium before you decide. Germanium is great, but it is temperamental

What do you mean when you say it's temperamental? Again, I apologise for my lack of knowledge haha :rolleyes:

Also, does anyone have any experience with the Danelectro Cool Cat Fuzz? I hear great things about them and for £35 they seem pretty solid.
I just want to know if they can do the low-gain fuzz sound as well as a really fat, noisy, but not too saturated wall of noise type thing when mixed with an OD pedal?

Germanium is nice because it can have a warmth to it, and generally(not always) cleans up better with your guitar volume knob.

However, it is temperature sensitive, I'm not sure if it's any temperature change, or just heat, but it can change the sound. So you might want to factor that in if you planning on gigging a lot.


This being said, I do love my Fuzz Factory, but it can sound like two different pedals depending on the environment(not to mention occasionally picking up radio signals)

I'm doing the same research right now. Looking for a nice fuzz and a reverb too. I have been looking at the holy grails and the big muff pi lines. Thoughts and comparisons?

I cannot recommend the Dentone 1967 Fuzz Face enough. Really well built Germanium FF clone that put an end to my many years of searching. Works extremely well with other fuzzes, boosts, and drives. He's a really good guy to work with, too. Knows his stuff.

To me, as an inexperienced fuzzer, I think I'd prefer a having the consistency and reliability for live shows at least, which makes me think a silcon fuzz is probably the way to go if I'm going to be using it a fair bit.

EDIT: but saying that, I think I'd prefer the lower-gain sound of germanium... This is very difficult decision without much experience, what would you guys use personally? I also think I'm going to buy the bullet and get an actual fuzz face.

I'm sorry to double post in my own thread but anyone know if the Dunlop Jimi Hendrix Silicon Fuzz Face would be able to do that really blown-out, fat, wall of noise thing I'm looking for when layered with an OD?
Would you choose the JH Fuzz or the MXR BC108?

Also, what's a good used price (£) for the JH-F1?

Check out noisemaker effects, 100 dollars gets you the chimera, a 12 mode fuzz.

I'm sorry to double post in my own thread but anyone know if the Dunlop Jimi Hendrix Silicon Fuzz Face would be able to do that really blown-out, fat, wall of noise thing I'm looking for when layered with an OD?
Would you choose the JH Fuzz or the MXR BC108?

Also, what's a good used price (£) for the JH-F1?

I have the MXR 108, and I like it quite a bit. Good solid FF sounds.

I'm doing the same research right now. Looking for a nice fuzz and a reverb too. I have been looking at the holy grails and the big muff pi lines. Thoughts and comparisons?

The Holy Grail is a very satisfying reverb sound. I haven't looked for anything else in the 8 years I've had it.

I have the MXR 108, and I like it quite a bit. Good solid FF sounds.

Yep. It has a buffer so it plays nice with other pedals. Plus the buffer gives you a second set of sounds. And it's a lot more pedal board friendly than the round FF. It's a Dunlop FF in a rectangle box with a buffer.

I'm a big fan of the Blackarts Toneworks Pharaoh Fuzz:
http://proguitarshop.com/black-arts-toneworks-pharaoh-fuzz.html

Very versatile fuzz with both germanium and silicon diodes, or if you're really looking for a solid wall of fuzz destruction, you can bypass both. It goes from a boost, to an overdrive, to almost any level of fuzz. A little pricy, but inmo very worth it.

A fuzz Factory is cool, if you don't mind spending as much time tweaking as playing. I have the Seymour Duncan Tweak Fuzz and find it to be pretty versatile. I picked one up for $50 used at Sam Ash. I see them on craigslist for around the same price.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dl07ypqp9aw&list=UUVLMzJQwgbAxLjosJwSjdnQ&index=8&feature=plcp

Try the Caroline Guitar Company Olympia. I love mine.

Be prepared to be doing a lot of swapping. Fuzzes are very particular to their context (guitar, other effects, amp) and their placement in the signal chain. A fuzz face variant is the best place to start as these will tend to be more generally useful rather than noise makers.

A couple of thoughts on particular fuzzes I've actually used/owned.
- Skip a fuzz factory. While it's fun and makes crazy sounds, its very unpredictable. Even a slight tweak to a knob while playing can lead to total unexpected results. Think of the pedal as "Fuzz Roulette". It's better for the studio or as a guitar toy.
- Fulltone '69 - Great choice for a fuzz face. It's the one I've kept. Wide variety of sounds from overdrive to fuzz. Cleans up amazingly well...you could almost use this as an always on pedal.
- Fuzz Face reissue (flying saucer). It's another FF...sounds like a FF.....but the case is too big.
- Tweak Fuzz - skip it. Sucks.
- Keely Fuzz Head - Nice pedal...but is more of a distortion/fuzz than a traditional fuzz. Still a great effect regardless.
- Big Muff - Eh. Was too farty.
- Foxx Tone Machine (I built this). Crazy sounding....but too weird for anything other than occasional use.
- Boss Fuzz -(FZ5?) surprising good. I tend to hate Boss stuff but it's decent and cheap.

Spend some time on Fuzz Box Girl's youtube channel as she's reviewed a bunch....but I'd still stick to a fuzz face variant for a first time fuzz.

What's your opinion on the Way Huge Swollen Pickle. I like mine over the Boss but am interested to hear what anyone else has to say.

For what you describe, I'd also try a fuzz face if I were you.

For what it's worth, I own and use a Sybil Fuzz from Retroman. It's a lot more than you're willing to spend, however here's what I think about it and maybe my observations are of some use to you:

The Sybil is actually 2 fuzz faces in 1 enclosure, so there's a silicon side and a germanium side, I have the 2-switch version with NKT275s in it, so I can only tell you about that version. What the two switches do is they enable you to use both sides separately, but you can also combine them and with an added switch choose which side runs into which, so when you combine them, you can run the silicon side into the germanium side or vice versa.

About the differences of silicon vs. germanium when playing one of them separately, from my experience, so take this with a grain of salt:

The germanium side reacts way better to what you do with the volume knob on your guitar and to how hard or gentle your picking is. I use a SF Bandmaster Reverb which I mostly run pretty (but not squeaky) clean and when I use my Tele (a '52 RI) I am still able to get "almost" clean sounds just by going very easy on the strings with my right hand, even when the gain knob on the fuzz is turned to maximum. When I turn down the volume on my guitar, there's a plethora of very interesting "in-between" sounds to be had. So it behaves in a very dynamic way and it behaves itself more like a very dynamic and responsive overdrive than what you'd normally expect when you hear the word "fuzz" - it's not totally saturated craziness, neither is it extremely compressed and I can still hear which of my guitars I'm actually playing. It's hard to put in words, but a germanium fuzz face is so far removed from a Big Muff, for example, that they are really two completely different effects for me. With a Muff, your guitar sounds like a raging behemoth, with a germanium fuzz face, it doesn't.

The silicon side is a completely different beast - there's a little more gain on tap and you don't get those in-between sounds when you use your guitar's volume knob and it reacts differently (much less) to what you do with your right hand. It's got more sustain (some describe it as violin-like, I can in a way subscribe to that) but it can also get a bit ice-picky - at least when going into an almost clean Fender amp with a Tele on the bridge pickup. Sure, you'd expect that but it's more ice-picky than what you get with the germanium side, so in my case, the tone knob on the pedal and that on my guitar see a lot of use when using the silicon side, at least when using my Tele.

I also have a Les Paul and with that it's a different story, it's got very low output pickups (like the Tele) but you still notice they're humbuckers, so it pushes the pedal and the amp in a different way and some of the lead sounds I get from using its neck pickup with the silicon side of the Sybil is really great to my ears.

About stacking with other pedals: I normally don't do this because there's two fuzz boxes in one with the Sybil and I prefer just stacking those because the possibilities are endless, there's tons of cool settings in there.
However, I'm still interested in trying a Catalinbread Dirty Little Secret with it - that pedal is supposed to be a Marshall in a box and I'm very curious what kinds of sounds I could produce with stacking the Sybil into that pedal.

Another option is to use a dedicated booster INTO the fuzz face because the circuit is extremely responsive to what goes into it. With the LP or my Jazzmaster, there's much more gain on tap from the Sybil than when I use my Tele (because of more output from the JM and the humbuckers on the LP) and the maximum gain level of the pedal changes a lot. If you want more saturated, thicker sounds out of it, try a few different boost pedals. I have a BYOC tri-boost which I sometimes have in my signal chain and I've made good experiences with using some of the boost functions on that pedal into the Sybil (the germanium boost struck me as being very nice).

I can't really tell you about other fuzz faces or other fuzz circuits because I'm really happy with my pedal and it's been quite a while since I went hunting down fuzz pedals in local stores. I remember that I liked one of the Fulltone fuzzes a lot (might have been the '69) but I'm not sure about the rest.

One final thing about fuzz faces: I really love them because they are different than other, more "extreme" fuzz circuits, that's because they produce pretty complex sounds and play so very lively, dynamic and responsive. One other thing of note - at least my Sybil doesn't get lost in the mix. Ever. Fuzz as an effect is notorious for such a behavior, because some fuzz sounds are extremely compressed and tend to get lost in a full band situation. It can also be set in a way that there is no loss in volume, which is also a thing that happens with a lot of fuzz boxes. I can even boost my signal with the pedal.

I would never leave home again without some kind of fuzz face. I don't want to make this sound like a commercial for Retroman products (and I'm in no way affiliated to them) and I'm sure there are other cool fuzz faces out there, it's just that I know this particular pedal very well and because it's the only incarnation of a fuzz face that I own, I can only use that pedal as a reference point. I can tell you that the main reason for buying it is that I just can't decide between germanium and silicon, even if this post might suggest that I prefer germanium, I sincerely love to use them both. And the combination of the two of them is just cool, so I had to get that pedal, which also has to do with the fact that I really need a variety of fuzzy sounds for what I do.

Regards and good luck on your "quest",
Stephan

EDIT: One last thing I forgot - at least in my opinion, the "legend" about using 9v batteries (zinc carbon) rather than any kind of power supply with a fuzz face, seems to be true. Imho it sounds best with a battery in it (these will last a long time, anyway, a fuzz face doesn't seem to drain vast amounts of energy)

^That's an awesome response!

I got a sweet deal on a Voodoo Labs Superfuzz, and I've been pretty happy with it. Gets lots of different sounds, and with a couple of extra knobs, it can be tweaked. Really nice.

Thanks Tsetse!

The new-fuzz-on-the-block that i really like :


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Will probably get one asap.