Fuzz
Fuzz
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JTB 76 A friend of ours brought his 1976 Jumbo Tonebender over for us to have a go with, insisting it was the dogs bollocks. Having built things on this circuit before (it's essentially 3/4 of a muff) we were quite dubious about this claim. Long story short, we f**king loved it. The girth of a muff, but with that fizz of an older Tonebender. But, being mostly the same topology as a muff, none of the hang-ups of an old fuzz when it comes to playing nice with other things. So we took some photos and cloned it. Then found some transistors that were in the correct ranges and had the right sound then back-to-backed it with the original to make sure it was nailed on. It was. On top of this we found that it was also only two components away from being a B&M Fuzz Unit... It'd be rude not to put them in on a switch now wouldn't it? |
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UltraStoner MkIII All the remaining pedals are muff derivatives built on the Yorkshire Pi board. Which is a simplified PCB (vs the Ultrastoner MkII) allowing us to build more focused versions of our favourite muffs. The UltraStoner MkIII uses async germanium clippers, concentrating on what it does best, which is ball-shaking sludgy doom. |
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TSM680 MkIII The TSM680 MkIII is an agressive muff with a mid-focus, bordering on distortion. This one uses LED clipping to maintain that hard edge. |
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71 Triangle The remaining two muffs are clones of two of our favourite old muffs. Both with the addition of a mids pot to allow it to work better in a band situation. With the mids all the way counter clockwise, the pedal is stock. This pedal is a clone of a 1971 Triangle muff, and in my opinion is the most 'muffy' sounding of the lot. At least I suspect it's what people are thinking of when they imagine a muff sound. |
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DGM3 Last but not least for the straight muffs is a Violet Ram's Head clone. After a bit of logic, we suspect this is what David Gilmour's number one muff is based on. It would seem to make sense as it works really well for lead playing and is oddly not as great when it comes to chords. This one has the most effective mid pot of them all. I usually try and leave a little bit of scoop at the top of the range for the pedal to remain sounding muffy. This one I've set to go pretty much flat. |
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Ultra 78 Grind Customs Ultra78, which is an op-amp big muff (ICBM) with the tone settings from an Ultrastoner. This gives a lot more range to the controls and a mids pot. As usual for an ICBM there's a tone bypass switch, flick this and it sounds like a stock ICBM with the tone bypassed. |
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