RatingsPros:A sweet sounding distillate of Russian Big Muff virtues. Handsome, high-quality build. Cons: Hard to determine control levels. Some settings sound too civilized and compressed. Street: $179 JHS Crimson jhspedals.com | Tones:  Ease of Use: Build/Design: Value:  |
In my life, the ecstasy of ripping through a Sovtek Big Muff often felt like the most important thing in the universe. It was liberating and cathartic. Stooges and Sabbath riffs, quasi-Gilmourisms, even shards of Davey Allen all flowed easily from the fountain of Sovtek. It changed the way I related to electric guitar.
These days, my Sovtek only comes out for special occasions. But I know the sound—that growling, funky, ferocious, filthy sound—in my bones. And it took just a minute of listening to JHS’s newest Sovtek Muff homage, the Crimson, to hear how deftly they captured that outsized sound and spirit.
Sovtek cultists will point out that the Crimson is inspired not by a Big Muff, but a Mike Mathews Sovtek Red Army Overdrive. Saner heads will remind those lunatics that the Red Army Overdrive is a Big Muff in everything but name. Though there are small differences between some component values in the Red Army Overdrive and the “Civil War” Big Muff that followed, the circuit and sounds are near twins. And like those pedals, the Crimson neatly sums qualities that make all Russian Big Muffs—from the Civil War to tall and bubble-font green editions—some of the sickest, smoothest, and meanest fuzz pedals ever built. If you’re looking for a portal into that sound world, it’s hard to imagine a better point from which to plunge.
Red Means Go
Like the rest of JHS’s Legends of Fuzz series, Crimson comes in a 5.68" long, 3.62" wide, wedge-shaped enclosure that clearly nods at the Shin-ei FY-2 Companion Fuzz. Hardcore space obsessives will likely lament these still sizable dimensions. But it looks awesome, and, like its Sovtek forebears, it’s an inviting target.
There’s not much to learn from lifting the hood on the Crimson. (I don’t say this figuratively: You can actually undo the two lower screws and open it up like a clamshell.) The circuit is inverted, so you can’t see the components. But the Crimson looks well put together on the interior, with chassis mounted jacks and I/Os and a 9V battery clip. The I/O jacks and 9V DC jack are situated low on the crown of the pedal. The three knobs for output volume, tone, and gain are also situated on the crown of the pedal—looking like three top-hatted gents in a theatre box.
The controls have great feel and resistance, and operating them from that orientation is a tactile joy. But there are few visual cues to indicate the level of a given control, which definitely makes adjustments a listening exercise. There is also a side-mounted push button that shifts the circuit’s fundamental voice into a louder more mid-forward character. It’s useful for making the Crimson more prominent in a bass-heavy mix, though not the source of my favorite tones.
Do the St. Petersburg Stomp
Broadly speaking, the Crimson encapsulates the most famous virtues of the Sovtek Muffs. The output is heavy and detailed in the low-mids, which pairs with white-hot top-end to create growling composite sounds for chords and vocal, sustained lead tones. There’s plenty of gain in the tank and the bass is fat and thumping. Still, the Crimson possesses many unique attributes that align with Red Army Overdrive legend and differentiate it from other Russian Muff types.
I used an old bubble-font green Sovtek as comparison. And though the two pedals sounded more alike than different, there are perceptible divergences in tone and feel. In power-chord settings, the Crimson sounds a bit more stitched together and compressed—succinct, punchy, and perfect for fast riffs—than the bubble-font Big Muff, which may sound a little more rabid and scooped. It is also tighter and more focused in the high-mid range—even without the midrange boost. Lead lines reveal the Crimson’s knack for feeling controlled without subtracting aggression.
The Verdict
Furious, fun, and pretty fairly priced, the Crimson is superbly representative of the Russian Big Muff family—and intriguingly different. Most noticeably, it possesses a smoothness that gives you the fire of a Big Muff with a touch of extra civility and control. It’s the ideal gateway Muff.
Watch the First Look with Yvette Young:
The Rickenbacker 481’s body style was based on the 4001 bass, popularly played by Paul McCartney. Even with that, the guitar was too experimental to reach its full potential.
By the early 1970s, the great interest the lads had sparked in 6- and 12-string Ricks had waned. But thankfully for the company, there was still high demand for yet another Beatles-played instrument: the 4001 bass.
Paul McCartney was gifted a 4001 by Rickenbacker in 1965, which he then used prominently throughout the group’s late-’60s recordings and while leading Wings all through the ’70s. Other rising stars of rock also donned 4000 series models, like Yes’Chris Squire, Pink Floyd’sRoger Waters, the Bee Gees’ Maurice Gibb, Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Stu Cook, and more.
And like that, a new star was born.
So, what’s a guitar company to do when its basses are selling better than its guitars? Voilà: The Rickenbacker 480. Introduced in 1972, it took the 4000-series body shape and created a standard 6-string out of it, using a bolt-on neck for the first time in the brand’s history.
The 481’s slanted frets predate the modern multi-scale phenomenon by decades. The eight-degree tilt of the frets is matched by an eight-degree tilt of the nut, pickups, and bridge.
“It was like a yo-yo at Rickenbacker sometimes,” factory manager Dick Burke says in Rickenbacker Guitars: Out of the Frying Pan Into the Fireglo. “We got quiet in the late ’60s, but when the bass started taking off in the ’70s, we got real busy again, so making a 6-string version of that was logical, I guess.”
The gambit worked, for a time. Sales of the 480 were strong enough at first that, in 1973, a deluxe model was introduced—the 481—and it’s one of these deluxe versions that we’re showcasing here.
“The 481 features slant frets—pointing ever-so-slightly toward the body of the guitar—and the eight-degree tilt of the frets is matched by an eight-degree tilt of the nut, pickups, and bridge.”
Take a close look and you’ll notice that the body shape isn’t the only remarkable feature. The 481 was Rickenbacker’s first production run to feature humbucker pickups. Here, you can see each humbucker’s 12 pole pieces dotting through the chrome cover, a variant casing only available from 1975 to 1976. (Interestingly enough, the pickups had first been developed for the 490, a prototype that never made it to public release, which would’ve allowed players to substitute different pickups by swapping loaded pickguards in and out of the body.)
The new pickups were also treated with novel electronics. The standard 3-way pickup-selector switch is here, but so is a second small switch that reverses the pickups’ phase when engaged.
The inventive minds at Rickenbacker didn’t stop there: The 481 features slant frets—pointing ever-so-slightly toward the body of the guitar—and the eight-degree tilt of the frets is matched by an eight-degree tilt of the nut, pickups, and bridge.
Long before the fanned fret phenomenon caught on in the modern, progressive guitar landscape, Rickenbacker had been toying around with the slant-fret concept. Originally available from 1970 forward as a custom order on other models, slant frets were all but standard on the 481 (only a small minority of straight-fret 481s were built).
The 481 was the deluxe version of the 480, which preceded it and marked the first time the company used a bolt-on neck.
Dick Burke, speaking separately to writer Tony Bacon in an interview published on Reverb, only half-recalls the genesis and doesn’t remember them selling particularly well: “Some musicians said that’s the way when you hold the neck in your left hand—your hand is slanted. So, we put the slanted frets in a few guitars. I don’t know how many, maybe a hundred or two—I don’t recall.”
Even proponents of the 481 do not necessarily sing the praises of the slanted fretboard. Kasabian’s Serge Pizzorno, a 481 superfan, told Rickenbacker Guitars author Martin Kelly, “I don’t just love the 481, it’s part of me.... The 481’s slanted frets have made my fingers crooked for life, but I don’t care, I’ll take that for it’s given me riff after riff after riff."
Initial 480-series sales were promising, but the models never really took off. Though they were built as late as 1984, the slant-fret experiment of the 481 was called off by 1979. And these slanted models have not, in the minds of most players or collectors, become anywhere near as sought-after as the classic 330s and 360s, or, for that matter, the 4001s.
For that reason, 481s—despite their novelty and their lists of firsts for Rickenbacker—can still be found for relatively cheap. Our Vintage Vault pick, which is being sold by the Leicester, England-based Jordan Guitars Ltd, has an asking price of 3,350 British pounds (or about 4,300 U.S. dollars), which is still well under half the going-rate of early 360s, 660s, and other more famous Ricks. Some lucky buyers have even found 481s on Reverb for less than $2,000, which is unheard of for other vintage models.
With its idiosyncratic charms, the 481 remains more within reach than many other guitars of a similar vintage.
Sources: Martin Kelly’s Rickenbacker Guitars: Out of the Frying Pan Into the Fireglo, Tony Bacon’s"Interview: Dick Burke on the Creation of the Rickenbacker 12-String | Bacon’s Archive" on Reverb, Reverb Price Guide sales data.
