A ferocious vintage-style silicon fuzz with more than a touch of Tone Bender color and attitude.
Versatile controls yield interesting twists on excellent, authentic, and powerful vintage fuzz tones. Sturdy.
Expensive relative to some similar pedals.
$199
Boss FZ-1w Fuzz
boss.info
In 2021, Boss jumped back in the fuzz game in spectacular fashion with the TB-2W, a high-profile, very limited, and now very expensive version of the germanium Tone Bender MkII. So, it’s less than surprising that the new FZ-1W Waza Craft—with its grinding, growling chord tones, burly, angry-bee buzz, and brash-to-singing high-register lead sounds—falls squarely in the Tone Bender’s sonic camp. And with surprisingly range-y tone and gain controls, and a modern mode that adds body and midrange presence, it’s a tantalizing option for vintage-curious players that crave more tone-shaping power than simple 2-knob fuzzes provide.
Primordial Buzz
Though Boss are quick to point out that the FZ-1W is an original design, they also say that much of the inspiration and practical insight that produced the pedal came by way of the TB-2W design experience. Played alongside authentic clones of various Tone Bender versions, the FZ-1W’s voice is unquestionably unique. But it’s easy to hear the influence of the Tone Bender’s big, brash attitude, and many similarities shine through.
Like a Tone Bender MkII, the FZ-1W’s core tonality walks the line between the reediness of early fuzzes and more modern gain profiles. The voice is less open and throaty than germanium Tone Bender MkII or germanium Fuzz Face-style pedals, but even in its vintage mode the tight midrange focus gives leads a smoother, more vocal quality and makes punky power chords sound big and detailed without collapsing into a heap of compressed tone mud.
The FZ-1W’s toppiest tone settings never sound shrill—even with a Telecaster bridge pickup and an old Fender piggyback on either end of the signal chain.
Humbuckers produce absolutely massive tones in the vintage and more mid-forward modern mode. And players questing for ’60s sizzle on top of a measure of Big Muff-like mass will love the way woolier pickups pair with the FZ-1W’s wailing voice. Single-coil pickups accentuate the toppier side of the FZ-1W’s personality, but they sound no less aggressive. And it’s easy to imagine the heat and intensity of these single-coil sounds working as devastating counterpoint or doubling textures for big bass riffs.
Tones in the Shadows
One big difference between the FZ-1W and many vintage fuzzes is its effective tone control. It gives you a lot of leeway for crafting more creative and less canonically ’60s fuzz sounds. It also has a very wide range. The FZ-1Ws toppiest tone settings never sound shrill—even with a Telecaster bridge pickup and an old Fender piggyback on the ends of the signal chain. The darkest tones also remain menacing and substantial at high fuzz levels.
The fuzz control provides even more interesting ways to expand and enhance the FZ-1Ws tone vocabulary. This too is a substantial difference between the FZ-1W and pedals like the Tone Bender MkII, which tend to sound supercharged with gain or just slightly less supercharged with gain. The sounds that lurk in these more modest ranges of the fuzz control aren’t always obviously beautiful, but they are often distinctive, uncommon tones that stand tall and sound unique in a mix, and in some ways better approximate the cool, if less ferocious, fuzz sounds that less-hip engineers forced upon overzealous players in studios in the mid-’60s.
The FZ-1Ws silicon circuitry means it won’t be as dynamically responsive to volume attenuation as a germanium Fuzz Face or the less-dynamic Tone Bender Mk II. But if you’re running the gain at maximum, the fuzz can still be tamed into an aggressive purr that lives on the distorted side of the overdrive spectrum. Lower pedal gain settings and guitar volume attenuation can produce near-clean tones.
The Verdict
While the FZ-1W isn’t a Tone Bender clone, it speaks with a very similar accent. And with its less cantankerous silicon circuitry and more versatile control set, it dwells in a sweet spot between authentic mid-’60s-ness and more robust and flexible modern fuzz voices. At $199, it also lives in a very competitive neighborhood where authentic and versatile takes on vintage sounds abound. As with any vintage-voiced fuzz, it’s a good idea to explore how the FZ-1W’s bold tonalities work with your favorite guitar and amp. But if this Boss fits your rig, you can bet you’ll uncover a wealth of fuzz surprises that simpler, more traditional pedals will have a hard time delivering.
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Small spring, big splash—a pedal reverb that oozes surfy ambience and authenticity.
A vintage-cool sonic alternative to bigger tube-driven tanks and digital springs that emulate them.
Susceptible to vibration.
$199
Danelectro Spring King Junior
danelectro.com
Few pedal effects were transformed, enhanced, and reimagined by fast digital processors quite like reverb. This humble effect—readily available in your local parking garage or empty basketball gymnasium for free—evolved from organic sound phenomena to a very unnatural one. But while digital processing yields excellent reverb sounds of every type and style, I’d argue that the humble spring reverb still rules in its mechanical form.
Danelectro’s Spring King Junior, an evolution of the company’s Spring King from the ’aughts, is as mechanical as they come. It doesn’t feature a dwell control or the huge, haunted personality of a Fender Reverb unit. But the Spring King Junior has a vintage accent and personality and doesn’t cost as much as a whole amplifier like a Fender Reverb or reverb-equipped combo does. But it’s easy to imagine making awesome records and setting deep stage moods with this unit, especially if 1950s and 1960s atmospheres are the aim.
Looking Past Little
Size factors significantly into the way a spring reverb sounds. And while certain small spring tanks sound cool—the Roland RE-201 Space Echo’s small spring reverb for one—it’s plain hard to reproduce the clank and splash from a 17" Fender tank with springs a fraction of that length. Using three springs less than 3 1/2" long, the Accutronics/Belton BMN3AB3E module that powers the Spring King Junior is probably not what you want in a knife fight with Dick Dale. Even so, it imparts real character that splits the difference between lo-fi and garage-y and long-tank expansiveness.
In very practical and objective terms, the Danelectro can’t approach a Fender Reverb’s size and cavernousness. Matching the intensity of the Spring King Junior’s maximum reverb and tone settings to my own Fender Reverb’s means keeping dwell, mix, and tone controls between 25 to 30 percent of their max. Depending on your tastes, that might be a useful limitation. If you’ve used a Fender Reverb unit before, you know they can sound fantastically extreme. It’s overkill for a lot of folks, and the Spring King Junior inhabits spaces that don’t overpower a guitar or amplifier’s essence. Many players will find the Spring King Junior simply easier to manage and control.
There are ways to add size to the Spring King Junior’s output. An upstream, edgy clean boost will do much to puff up the Danelectro’s profile next to a Fender. The approach comes with risk: Too much drive excites certain frequencies to the point of feedback. But the Junior’s mellower sounds are abundant and interesting. Darker reverb tones sound awesome, and combined with modest reverb mixes they add a spooky aura to melancholy soul and spartan semi-hollow jazz phrasings—all in shades mostly distinct from Fender units.
Watch Your Step!
Spring reverbs come with operational challenges that you won’t experience in a digital emulation. And though the Spring King Junior is well built, its relative slightness compounds some of those challenges. The spring module, for instance, is affixed to the Spring King Junior’s back panel with two pieces of foam tape. And while kicking a spring reverb to punctuate a dub mix or surf epic is a gas, the Spring King Junior can be susceptible to less intentional applications of this effect. At extra-loud volumes, the unit picks up vibrations from the amplifier’s output when amp and effect are in tight proximity. And sometimes, merely clicking the bypass switch elicits an echo-y “clank”. This doesn’t happen in every performance setting. But it’s worth considering settings where you’ll use the Spring King Junior and how loud and vibration-resistant those spaces will be.
Though the Spring King Junior’s size makes it susceptible to vibration, many related ghost tones—taken in the right measure—are a cool and essential part of its voice. It’s an idiosyncratic effect, so evaluating its compatibility with specific instruments, amps, studio environments, and performance settings is a good idea. But for those that do find a place for the Spring King Junior, its combination of tone color, compact size, and hazy 1960s ambience could be a deep well of inspiration.
After eight years, New Orleans artist Benjamin Booker returns with a new album and a redefined relationship to the guitar.
It’s been eight years since the New Orleans-based artist released his last album. He’s back with a record that redefines his relationship to the guitar.
It is January 24, and Benjamin Booker’s third full-length album, LOWER, has just been released to the world. It’s been nearly eight years since his last record, 2017’s Witness, but Booker is unmoved by the new milestone. “I don’t really feel anything, I guess,” he says. “Maybe I’m in shock.”
That evening, Booker played a release celebration show at Euclid Records in New Orleans, which has become the musician’s adopted hometown. He spent a few years in Los Angeles, and then in Australia, where his partner gave birth to their child, but when he moved back to the U.S. in December 2023, it was the only place he could imagine coming back to. “I just like that the city has kind of a magic quality to it,” he says. “It just feels kind of like you’re walking around a movie set all the time.”
Witness was a ruminative, lonesome record, an interpretation of the writer James Baldwin’s concept of bearing witness to atrocity and injustice in the United States. Mavis Staples sang on the title track, which addressed the centuries-old crisis of police killings and brutality carried out against black Americans. It was a significant change from the twitchy, bluesy garage-rock of Booker’s self-titled 2014 debut, the sort of tunes that put him on the map as a scrappy guitar-slinging hero. But Booker never planned on heroism; he had no interest in becoming some neatly packaged industry archetype. After Witness, and years of touring, including supporting the likes of Jack White and Neil Young, Booker withdrew.
He was searching for a sound. “I was just trying to find the things that I liked,” he explains. L.A. was a good place for his hunt. He went cratedigging at Stellaremnant for electronic records, and at Artform Studio in Highland Park for obscure jazz releases. It took a long time to put together the music he was chasing. “For a while, I left guitar, and was just trying to figure out what I was going to do,” says Booker. “I just wasn’t interested in it anymore. I hadn’t heard really that much guitar stuff that had really spoke to me.”
“For a while, I left guitar, and was just trying to figure out what I was going to do. I just wasn’t interested in it anymore.”
LOWER is Booker’s most sensitive and challenging record yet.
Among the few exceptions were Tortoise’s Jeff Parker and Dave Harrington from Darkside, players who moved Booker to focus more on creating ambient and abstract textures instead of riffs. Other sources of inspiration came from Nicolas Jaar, Loveliescrushing, Kevin Shields, Sophie, and JPEGMAFIA. When it came to make LOWER (which released on Booker’s own Fire Next Time Records, another nod to Baldwin), he took the influences that he picked up and put them onto guitar—more atmosphere, less “noodly stuff”: “This album, I was working a lot more with images, trying to get images that could get to the emotion that I was trying to get to.”
The result is a scraping, aching, exploratory album that demonstrates that Booker’s creative analysis of the world is sharper and more potent than ever. Opener “Black Opps” is a throbbing, metallic, garage-electronic thrill, running back decades of state surveillance, murder, and sabotage against Black community organizing. “LWA in the Trailer Park” is brighter by a slim margin, but just as simultaneously discordant and groovy. The looped fingerpicking of “Pompeii Statues” sets a grounding for Booker to narrate scenes of the homelessness crisis in Los Angeles. Even the acoustic strums of “Heavy on the Mind” are warped and stretched into something deeply affecting; ditto the sunny, garbage-smeared ’60s pop of “Show and Tell.” But LOWER is also breathtakingly beautiful and moving. “Slow Dance in a Gay Bar” and “Hope for the Night Time” intermingle moments of joy and lightness amid desperation and loneliness.
Booker worked with L.A.-based hip-hop and electronic producer Kenny Segal, trading stems endlessly over email to build the record. While he was surrounded by vintage guitars and amps to create Witness, Booker didn’t use a single amplifier in the process of making LOWER: He recorded all his guitars direct through an interface to his DAW. “It’s just me plugging my old Epiphone Olympic into the computer and then using software plugins to manipulate the sounds,” says Booker. For him, working digitally and “in the box” is the new frontier of guitar music, no different than how Hendrix and Clapton used never-heard-before fuzz pedals to blow people’s minds. “When I look at guitar players who are my favorites, a lot of [their playing] is related to the technology at the time,” he adds.
“When I look at guitar players who are my favorites, a lot of [their playing] is related to the technology at the time.”
Benjamin Booker's Gear
Booker didn’t use any amps on LOWER. He recorded his old Epiphone Olympic direct into his DAW.
Photo by Trenity Thomas
Guitars
- 1960s Epiphone Olympic
Effects
- Soundtoys Little AlterBoy
- Soundtoys Decapitator
- Soundtoys Devil-Loc Deluxe
- Soundtoys Little Plate
“I guess I have a problem with anything being too sugary. I wanted a little bit of ugliness.”
Inspired by a black metal documentary in which an artist asks for the cheapest mic possible, Booker used only basic plugins by Soundtoys, like the Decapitator, Little AlterBoy, and Little Plate, but the Devil-Loc Deluxe was the key for he and Segal to unlock the distorted, “three-dimensional world” they were seeking. “Because I was listening to more electronic music where there’s more of a focus on mixing than I would say in rock music, I think that I felt more inspired to go in and be surgical about it,” says Booker.
Part of that precision meant capturing the chaos of our world in all its terror and splendor. When he was younger, Booker spent a lot of time going to the Library of Congress and listening to archival interviews. On LOWER, he carries out his own archival sound research. “I like the idea of being able to put things like that in the music, for people to just hear it,” says Booker. “Even if they don’t know what it is, they’re catching a glimpse of life that happened at that time.”
On “Slow Dance in a Gay Bar,” there are birds chirping that he captured while living in Australia. Closer “Hope for the Night Time” features sounds from Los Angeles’ Grand Central Market. “Same Kind of Lonely” features audio of Booker’s baby laughing just after a clip from a school shooting. “I guess I have a problem with anything being too sugary,” says Booker. “I wanted a little bit of ugliness. We all have our regular lives that are just kind of interrupted constantly by insane acts of violence.”
That dichotomy is often difficult to compute, but Booker has made peace with it. “You hear people talking about, ‘I don’t want to have kids because the world is falling apart,’” he says. “But I mean, I feel like it’s always falling apart and building itself back up. Nothing lasts forever, even bad times.”
YouTube It
To go along with the record, Booker produced a string of music videos influenced by the work of director Paul Schrader and his fascination with “a troubled character on the edge, reaching for transcendence.” That vision is present in the video for lead single “LWA in the Trailer Park.”
Blackstar Amplification unveils its new AIRWIRE i58 wireless instrument system for guitar and bass.
The AIRWIRE i58 enables wireless connection for guitars, basses and other musical instruments with ¼” audio outputs and delivers low noise and less dropouts. The majority of wireless systems on the market operate within the 2.4 GHz range whereas the AIRWIRE i58 operates within the 5.8 GHz which is a less crowded frequency band that is immune to WiFi interference.
The AIRWIRE i58 also has an optimised antenna design and anti-interference algorithm – this gives players a robust, reliable and most importantly worry-free performance. The low latency and accurate frequency response ensures authentic tone and feel without the need for cables.
Never worry about running out of battery or losing your signal; AIRWIRE i58 offers up to 9 hours play time at full charge and features a transmission distance of 35 metres. Up to four AIRWIRE i58s can be used simultaneously for a full band setup without interference.
AIRWIRE i58 offers wireless high-res signal transfer, so there is no treble loss which can occur when using a long cable. However, the system offers a switchable CABLE TONE feature to simulate the tonal effects of a traditional instrument cable if players desire that sound.
AIRWIRE i58 is the ideal wireless system for every musician – for cable-clutter-free home use or freely roaming on stage.
AIRWIRE i58 Wireless Instrument System
- Wireless Instrument System
- Frequency Band: 5.8GHz
- Transmission Channels: 4 independent channels
- Transmission Distance: Up to 35 metres (100 feet)
- Latency: <6ms
- Frequency Response: 20Hz~20kHz
- Output Impedance: 1kΩm
- Connectors: ¼” mono
- Power: Rechargeable lithium-ion battery
- Charging: USB-C 5V input (cable included)
- Charging Time: <2.5 hours
- Operation Time: 9 hours when fully charged
- Illuminated star logo
- Dimensions: L 67.0mm, W 37.2mm, H 20.5mm
- Weight: 45g (each transmitter or receiver, single unit)
Blackstar’s AIRWIRE i58 carries a street price of $169.99.
PG Contributor Tom Butwin dives into three standout baritone guitars, each with its own approach to low-end power and playability. From PRS, Reverend, and Airline, these guitars offer different scale lengths, pickup configurations, and unique tonal options. Which one fits your style best? Watch and find out!