Editorial Director Ted Drozdowski’s current favorite noisemakers.
Premier Guitar’s editors use their favorite fuzz pedals in countless ways. At any point during our waking hours, one of us could be turned on, plugged in, and fuzzed out—chasing a Sabbath riff, tracking menacing drone ambience, fire-branding a solo break with a psychedelic blast, or something else altogether more deranged. As any PGreader knows, there are nearly infinite paths to these destinations and almost as many fuzz boxes to travel with. Germanium, silicon, 2-transistor, 4-transistor, 6-transistor, octave, multimode, modern, and caveman-stupid: Almost all of these fuzz types are represented among our own faves, which are presented here as inspiration, and launch pads for your own rocket rides to the Fuzz-o-sphere.
Ted Drozdowski - Editorial Director
My favorite is my Burns Buzz, a stomp custom-made for me by Gary Kibler of Big Knob Pedals. Gary specializes in recreations of old circuits, and this Burns Buzzaround-inspired box has four germanium NOS transistors and sounds beautifully gnarly. It improves on the original, which Robert Fripp favored in early King Crimson, by adding a volume control. I went a little stir-crazy acquiring fuzzes during Covid lockdown and now have an embarrassing amount. My other current darlings are a SoloDallas Orbiter (which balances fuzz with core-signal clarity), a Joe Gore Duh (a no-nonsense, 1-knob dirt shoveler), and my Big Knob Tone Blender MkII 66, which taught me how smooth and creamy fuzz can be with carefully calibrated settings. These pedals allow me to cover all of my favorite fuzz sounds from the past 60 years. I do have one more secret weapon fuzz that only travels to the studio: an original Maestro FZ-1 that I picked up used for about $20 in the early ’90s. It’s banged up but functional, takes two 9V batteries, and is righteously juicy.
Nick Millevoi - Senior Editor
The two greatest fuzzes I’ve ever played are a Pigdog Tone Bender build and a Paul Trombetta Bone Machine. Both experiences will stick with me for decades to come. But creations by those two masters of fuzz come with a price tag high enough to keep my time with those pedals fleeting.
Instead, my favorite fuzz is an inexpensive, mass-produced pedal that hasn’t left my board since I reviewed and subsequently purchased it in 2021: the Electro-Harmonix Ripped Speaker, designed to emulate the distorted tones on ’50s and ’60s records that were created with broken or misused gear.
Retro inspiration is not all it has to offer though. The rip knob, which controls transistor bias, is the star of the show, interacting with the fuzz level to deliver everything from a smooth, mild fuzz to sputtery mayhem that can evoke a faulty channel strip or old tube combo that’s been set ablaze. I prefer to crank the rip knob and feed it to a phaser and slapback analog delay, which gives me a bit-crushed-like gnarliness. Pull back on the rip or add a boost in front of the pedal, and it has a more organic but still gated sound, which, for me, can be just the thing to set my sound apart in a more traditional setting.
For a cool $116, the Ripped Speaker, which seems to fly under most fuzz freaks’ radars, might be the special something that complements the rest of your board or just a tone you turn to on occasion. Either way, it’s a great deal.
Luke Ottenhof - Assistant Editor
You could give me the most powerful-sounding fuzz in the world, but if it was in a stupid-looking enclosure, I don’t know if I’d give it a second look. This is just how we operate: Vision is the sense we privilege most, even in matters of audio.
Luckily, the most seismic, monstrous fuzz I’ve ever heard also happens to come in a beautiful package. The Mile End Effects Kollaps, built by Justin Cober in Montreal, measures an elephantine 7 3/8" x 4 5/8" x 1 1/2", and its MuTron-meets-’60s-Soviet aesthetic matches the sounds its guts produce. The Kollaps is modeled after the nasty Univox Super-Fuzz circuit, and carries a few of that pedal’s hallmarks, including its use of germanium diodes and midrange boost control. Cober added a switchable Baxandall active EQ circuit, with up to 12 dB of boost and cut to both low and high frequencies. Coupled with the mid-boost toggle, this gives the Kollaps a shockingly broad range of tonality to play with.
With the mids off, the Kollaps is jagged and ruthless, a deafening turbojet of upper mids and chest-vibrating lows that yanks me toward the darker, less commercially successful corners of ’90s doom and noise rock. Kicking on the EQ circuit and boosting the lows turns it titanic. With the balance (volume) and expand (gain) controls maxed, the Kollaps starts to live up to its name, crumbling into a thick, overextended chaos in a way more polite fuzz circuits rarely do.
My favorite Kollaps sounds occur when the mids are engaged, for an articulate, deeply textured fuzz sound that retains your attack. Playing with your guitar’s volume knob, you can coax a range of EQ profiles and take advantage of the upper- and lower-octave content in the fuzz. With guitar volume lower, you can access some unbelievably emotive and sensitive sounds that still teeter on the edge of chaos and violence. It’s a rich, volatile circuit that gets as close as I’ve heard to a sound and physical feeling I’d call “planet-destroying.”
Charles Saufley - Gear Editor
My first fuzz, A Sovtek Big Muff, remains tied for first place among many favorites. The pedal’s most famous virtues—corpulence and sustain—are among the reasons I treasure it. But the way the Sovtek pairs with a Rickenbacker 330 and Fender Jaguar, which were once my two primary guitars for performance and recording, made it invaluable in various projects for a long time. Neither the Ricky nor the Jag are sustain machines, but the wailing mass of theBig Muff makes their focused voices an asset—inspiring tight, concise fuzz phrases, hooks, and riffs as well as articulate chords.
A silicon Fuzzrite clone built by good pal Jesse Trbovich (long-time member ofKurt Vile’s Violators) runs second place to the Sovtek in terms of tenure, and is a very different fuzz. It’s a piercing, hyper-buzzy thing, but a perfect match for a squishy 1960s Fender Bassman head and 2x12 I adore. Perversely, I sometimes couple it with a Death By Audio Thee Ffuzz Warr Overload or Wattson FY-6 Shin-Ei Super-Fuzz clone. These tandems create chaos and chance, but sing loud and melodiously too—at least when I’m not intentionally bathing in feedback. The Jext Telez Buzz Tone, a clone of the mid-’60s Selmer circuit, is often my go-to now. It’s a low-gain affair compared to the other fuzzes here, and I use it in its even-lower-gain (and vintage-correct) 3-volt setting. It’s pretty noisy, but it is thick, dynamic, detailed, raunchy, and plenty trashy when the occasion demands it. It’s also a very cool overdrive when you back off the gas.
Jason Shadrick - Managing Editor
I rarely need fuzz in my everyday gigs, but it's one of the most fun effects to explore when I'm noodling around. At a NAMM show a few years ago I plugged into Mythos' Argo and as soon as I hit a note my eyes lit up. The sound of the fuzz wasn't unwieldy or hard to manage. It gave me the illusion of control while the octave was the magic dust on top. I knew right then I wasn't leaving the show without one. After I spent some time with it, I became enamored by how much more the Argo can do.
It's inspired by the Prescription Electronics C.O.B. (Clean Octave Blend), so the control set is similar. The octave is always present in the signal path, but you can dial it out with the blend knob. The fuzz and volume knobs are self explanatory, but dialing the fuzz and octave knobs all the way down gives you a killer boost pedal. I find my favorite settings are at the extremes of the fuzz and blend ranges. Typically, both are either all the way up or all the way down. Another great experiment is to turn the fuzz down and then pair it with a separate drive pedal. And in octave mode, Argo is one of those pedals that inspires you to head directly for the neck pickup and stay above the 12th fret.
In recent years, Samantha Fish’s most often-used guitar was this alpine white Gibson SG, but it ran into some issues last summer—“I ended up having to reglue the neck”—and it is now on hiatus.
Photo by Douglas Mason
Samantha Fish is moving in new circles these days—circles occupied by the kind of people you see a lot on classic-rock radio playlists. First there was the invitation from Eric Clapton to play at his 2023 Crossroads Guitar Festival in L.A. Then there was the summer ’24 slot on Slash’s S.E.R.P.E.N.T. tour, followed by the Experience Hendrix tour, on which she dug into Jimi classics in the company of Eric Johnson, Dweezil Zappa, and other luminaries. And, oh yeah, she opened for the Stones in Ridgedale, Missouri, on the final date of their Hackney Diamonds jaunt. That’s right, the Rolling Stones.
If you’re already a fan of Fish’s tough Delta-mama singing and high-temperature guitar work, you’ll probably think that all this is just as it should be. You gotta reap what you sow eventually, right? And Fish has been sowing for a long time, from her bar-band days in Kansas City 15 years ago through eight rootsy, eclectic albums as a leader (not counting the two early-2010s discs she cut with Dani Wilde and Victoria Smith as Girls with Guitars, or her 2013 outing with Jimmy Hall and Reese Wynans in the Healers, or 2023’s tangy swamp-rock collaboration with Jesse Dayton, Death Wish Blues) to her current tour schedule of about 150 dates per year in North America, the U.K., Europe, and Australia.
Still, even with such a solid career foundation to draw on, mixing and mingling in the flesh with folks you’ve known all your life as names on record covers could be a little intimidating. Is it? “You know, I don’t ever think about it in those terms,” Fish says on the phone from her home in New Orleans. “So when you lay it all out there like that, it feels like, ‘Aw shit, that’s crazy.’ I mean, it is crazy. When I think about the goals that I’ve made over the years … honestly, I’ve crossed off a bunch of things that I thought were even ironic being on the list, because they just seemed so far-fetched. Every interview I’ve ever done, they were like, ‘If you could ever open up for somebody, who would it be?’ And I always said the Stones, ironically. Cause when the hell’s that gonna happen? I’m a guitar player from Kansas. That’s nuts.”
With her Stogie Box Blues 4-string, heavy hitting style, and wide array of blues and rock influences, Fish is an artist of a different stripe.
Photo by Jim Summaria
Fish spits out the sentences above in a fast, excited spray, one word tumbling over another. Then she pauses for a second, and it’s clear that wheels are turning in her head. Her voice gets more playful. “I’m gonna start speaking some even wilder things into existence just to see what happens,” she cracks, her grin nearly audible over the line. “A billion dollars!No, money’s evil, but you know what I mean.”
“I wanted to lean into superpowers.”
Given her formidable chops, it’s not that daring a leap to suggest that Fish could be capable of playingsome wilder things into existence, too. She’s certainly off to a good start with the just-released Paper Doll, her ninth solo album overall and third for Rounder Records. Whether your personal taste leans more toward nasty string-snapping riffs (the aptly titled “Can Ya Handle the Heat?”), sizzling slide escapades (“Lose You”), or high lonesome twang (“Off in the Blue”), you can’t deny that the album’s loaded with prime guitar moments. And its two longest tracks, “Sweet Southern Sounds” and “Fortune Teller”—“longest” being a purely relative term (they’re both under six minutes)—offer listeners just a taste of the neo-psychedelic fantasias that can occur when Fish stretches out in concert.
“People always come up to me and say, ‘You’ve got to figure out a way to capture the live feeling on a record,’” she reports. “Sometimes you go into the studio and it’s like, ‘Shit, I gotta make the song work for vinyl, so let’s cut it down,’ and you end up hacksawing away some of these parts that are kind of the feeling and heartbeat of the song. This time we set out to make something that felt live.”
Fish made her recording debut in 2009 as the leader of the Samantha Fish Blues Band, with the punny-titled in-concert indie album Live Bait.
Photo by Curtis Knapp
That’s one way in which Paper Doll differs dramatically from its predecessor, 2021’s Faster, which delved into a poppier territory of synths, beats, and high-tech production (and, in this writer’s opinion, did so with great effectiveness; one of Faster’s highlights, “Hypnotic,” sounds like it could have been recorded at a late-night dance club hang with Prince and the Pointer Sisters). In contrast, obviously electronic sounds are nowhere to be heard on the new disc, and the music referenced stays firmly in the American roots category: soul, rock, country, juke-joint blues. For some artists, a stylistic shift like this could be seen as a retrenchment, but for Fish, it’s the result of a major departure. This is the first time she’s ever used her road band—keyboardist Mickey Finn, bassist Ron Johnson, and drummer Jamie Douglass—to make a studio album.
“Everybody’s scratching their heads about what genre this falls into, but I know where every song started—with a blues riff.”
“Usually,” Fish explains, “I’ve worked in studio situations where there’s been a producer and they want to put the people they know together. So it was cool to bring in the band that I’ve been playing with for the last couple of years instead of session musicians. I feel like the dynamic was different—the familiarity, and just kind of knowing where the others were gonna go. It might be a minute difference to a listener, but for the players in the room, it helped breed another sensibility.”
Also helping in that department was producer Bobby Harlow, late of Detroit garage-rock revivalists the Go. Paper Doll is the second Fish album that Harlow’s produced; the first was 2017’s Chills & Fever. But whereas that album was all covers, the focus this time was on original songs, more than half of them co-written by Harlow with Fish before he was even considered to produce the album.
“Last March, Bobby came out to a show we did in Detroit,” Fish recalls. “We went out to lunch, and because I was working on writing songs, I asked him to do some co-writing with me, because I love the songs he wrote for the Go. He’s really fun to be in a room with when you’re making something, because he’s incredibly devoted to it. So we started writing, and then a few months later the label was like, ‘We gotta make this album, who’s gonna produce it?’ Well, we’re on the road all summer, so I don’t know when y’all expect us to do this record. But Bobby was available, and it was like the universe bringing us back together. He was passionate about the kind of songs I was writing, and he understood where I wanted to go with it.”
Samantha Fish's Gear
Before finding her SG, Fish’s main guitar was her Delaney signature model thinline style, with a fish-shaped f-hole.
And where was that? “I wanted to lean into superpowers,” Fish quickly answers. “What are my strengths, what are the things that people know me for and recognize me for, and what can I amplify to make this a real statement record? It’s funny, because everybody’s scratching their heads about what genre this falls into, but I know where every song started—with a blues riff.”
Born out of the blues it may have been, but when the Paper Doll material reached the studio (actually, two studios: the Orb in Austin and Savannah Studios in L.A.), it went through some changes, partly due to the band’s contributions, partly due to Harlow’s conceptual leaps. “Bobby’s like a musicologist,” Fish says approvingly. “He’s deep. He pulls from so many different spaces, and he’s definitely introduced me to some things that I wasn’t hip to over the years. That’s done a lot to shape my musical tastes.” If you’ve had the significant pleasure of attending one of the many gigs in which Fish breaks out proto-punk nuggets like the MC5’s “Kick Out the Jams” and Love’s “7 and 7 Is,” well, now you know the guy to thank.
“This time we set out to make something that felt live.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, one of Paper Doll’s best tracks, “Rusty Tazor,” is a similar romp through the garage. In a rare case (for this album) of the producer bringing in someone he knows, Harlow tapped Mick Collins of cult faves the Gories and the Dirtbombs for backing vocals. “He adds such a personality to that song,” Fish says. “And I’m a punk rock fan. I love that whole era. I just love this raw, uninhibited way of playing. There’s nothing precious about it. Leaning into the edges—that’s where the real shit lies.”
Because the Paper Doll sessions took place in between periods of touring, Fish only brought her road instruments, including a new white Gibson SG and Stogie Box Blues 4-string cigar box guitar (see sidebar for more on her personal collection). But both the Austin and L.A. studios presented plenty of other options. “A ton of guitars,” Fish remembers with a laugh, “in varying degrees of disrepair. I used a rather unruly [Gibson ES-] 335 in Savannah for ‘Sweet Southern Sounds.’ You know how some guitars fight you when you play them? Well, I like a little bit of fight, but not so much that I’m pulling the strings out of the saddle, and it was fighting me like that. It was hard to push the strings down, I could only bend in certain places. But that just made the performance more intense, and it sounded good. There was also a Tele and a Strat that they had at the Orb. We had so many tools at our disposal, it was like, ‘Let’s go nuts and play with everything we can.’”
That choice of m.o. also sounds like a positive way to respond to a career moment that Fish calls “an incredible ride. Especially in the last year-and-a-half, two years, it’s just upped the ante even more. There’s nothing more to do, really. I went out, I played to the best of my ability and I did the thing that I’ve been working hard to do for the last 15 years or so. And it’s awesome to be able to show up in that capacity and perform alongside people that I’ve really looked up to. I just feel grateful. I know I’m lucky.”
Fish’s Favorites
Fish has a brawling style of playing slide, often on her cigar box. “Lose You,” on her new album, is especially representative of her approach to the classic blues technique.
Photo by Jim Summaria
For nearly a decade, Samantha Fish’s primary stage axe has been a 2015 alpine white Gibson SG that she bought new online. She’s still got it, but last year it ran into some trouble. “I ended up having to reglue the neck over the summer,” she says, “and it’s been having tuning issues. So Gibson sent me another white SG that’s just beautiful, in great shape. The neck’s a bit fatter, which is cool, different from mine. I’ve been using that one a lot”—indeed, the new SG is all over Paper Doll. “I’ve hung onto it, and I feel bad about that. I don’t want to be the person who borrows a guitar and keeps it. But it just played so great, and it was like, ‘I need this thing. What can I do to keep it?’ Luckily, the people at Gibson have been so good to me over the years.”
An even more recent addition to Fish’s electric arsenal is a Custom Shop Gibson ES-335 in silver sparkle finish, purchased in the fall at Eddie’s Guitars in St. Louis. “Because I played a 335 on ‘Sweet Southern Sounds’ in the studio, I was like, ‘Well, I’m gonna need one live, so of course I have to get this one!’ I’ve always wanted a silver sparkle, and this one is pristine. I’m so scared of the first scratch I get on it, or buckle rash. I’m probably gonna cry!”
Fish hasn’t been playing her Delaney SF1 Tele-style “Fish-o-caster” so much recently, but another Delaney model, the hollowbody 512, is still getting lots of action (often tuned to open D for slide use), as is her Stogie Box Blues 4-string, equipped with a P-Bass pickup. Her Danelectro baritone, Bohemian oil-can guitar, and clutch of Fender Jaguars are also safe at home, along with her current acoustic main squeeze, a new Martin D-45.
YouTube It
Samantha plays Jimi in this September 2024 performance from the most recent Experience Hendrix tour. The selection: “Fire.”
This year PG landed some elsuive white whales (TOOL, Pantera & Jack White), revisited some revamped setups (Jason Isbell, Foo Fighters & Kingfish), and got introduced to some unusual gear (King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard. Plus, the hosts share their favorite moments from the last 52 episodes before dropping a few coins into the wishing well for 2025 Rundown guests.
The legendary punk band are in the middle of an enormous multi-anniversary tour, celebrating both Dookie and American Idiot. Check out how bassist Mike Dirnt and guitarist Jason White tuned their road rigs to cover decades of sounds.
The Georgia-based sludge slingers rely on a Tele-to-Marshall combination for their punishing performances.
Since forming in 2010, Atlanta noise rockers Whores had only released one LP, 2016’s Gold.—until this year. Eight long years later, their new full-length, WAR., dropped in April, and Whores celebrated by tearing across the country and blasting audiences with their maelstrom of massive, sledge-hammering rock ’n’ roll.
The day after their gig at Cobra Nashville, Whores frontman Christian Lembach, dressed in his Nashville best, met up with PG’s Chris Kies at Eastside Music Supply to run through his brutal road rig.
When vocalist and guitarist Christian Lembach got sober over 20 years ago, he bought a FenderTelecaster off of a friend, then picked up an Esquire shortly after. That original Esquire stays home, but he brings this pine-body Earth Guitars Esquire out on the road. (It’s the lightest he’s ever played.) It’s loaded with a German-made reproduction of Schecter’s F520T pickup—aka the “Walk of Life” pickup intended to reproduce Mark Knopfler’s sound. (Lembach buys them in batches of five at a time to make sure he’s got plenty of backups.)
It’s equipped with a 3-way selector switch. At right, it bypasses the tone circuit; in the middle position, it’s a regular bridge-pickup configuration, with volume and tone activated; and at left, the tone is bypassed again, but an extra capacitor adds a bass boost.
Lembach installed six brass saddles in lieu of the traditional 3-saddle bridge. He often plays barre chords higher up the neck, and the six saddles allow for more accurate intonation.
All of Lembach’s guitars are tuned to drop C, and he plays with D’Addario Duralin .70 mm picks. They’re strung with heavy D’Addario NYXL sets, .013–.056 with a wound G. The 30-foot Bullet Cable coil cable attenuates some of the guitar’s top end.
Tuned-Up Tele
Lembach had this black Fender Telecaster—the one he bought from his friend—modified to his preferred Esquire specs, with a single bridge pickup and the same 3-way selector configuration as his other weapon. He prefers the 6-saddle bridge to this rusty 3-saddle version, but this one holds a special place in his heart all the same.
Favor From Furlan
When John Furlan of Furlan Guitars reached out to Lembach about building him a custom guitar, it was an easy sell. The two worked together on this beauty, based on a non-reverse Gibson Firebird body with a Fender-style scale length, roasted maple neck, and rosewood fretboard.
It’s got a bridge and locking tuners from Hipshot, and it’s loaded with Greenville Beauty Parlor P-90s. A typical Gibson-style toggle switches between neck, bridge, and both configurations, while another Esquire-style 3-way switch on the lower bout handles Lembach’s preferred bridge-pickup wirings: no tone, tone and volume, or bass boost.
No Logo
Lembach stays loyal to his twin Marshall Super Leads, with taped-over logos—an aesthetic Lembach picked up from Nirvana. A tech in Atlanta figured out that the one on the left is a 1973, which runs at eight ohms, or half power (Lembach removed two of the power tubes), into a 16-ohm cabinet. The power drop allows Lembach to coax feedback at lower volumes. The original preamp tubes from Yugoslavia—no longer a country, mind you—are still working in the amp.
The one on the right is a reissue 1959SLP from 2002 or 2003, which Lembach finds brighter than his vintage model. He goes into the lower-input second channel to dampen the edge.
Both amps run through Marshall JCM800 cabinets with Celestion G12T-75s.
Christian Lembach's Board
A Loop-Master Pedals Clean/Dirty Effects Switcher manages Lembach’s signal. Its A loop is used for verses, bridges, intros, and outros, and has the majority of the pedals in it. The first thing in the A loop is the ZVEX Fuzz Factory made specially for the band, followed by a Devi Ever Soda Meiser, Beetronics Swarm, Keeley Nova Wah, Spiral Electric FX Yellow Spiral, Boss NF-1, and Alexander Pedals Radical II Delay.
The B loop has a clone of the Electro-Harmonix Green Russian Big Muff, an EHX POG, and a ZVEX Super Hard On. The A loop is already pretty loud; B somehow gets even louder. An EHX Superego+ is a new addition that Lembach’s planning to integrate.
A CIOKS DC10 powers the board, and a Lehle device under the board cleans up unwanted hum and noise.
On this showcase pedalboard, Philadelphia’s Mountain King Electronics displayed the crushing fuzz of their Megalith, the bass-focused boost and overdrive of their Behemoth II, a truly psychedelic sonic journey via their Frequency-LSD, and much more at the 2024 Philly Pedal Party.
Photos by Nick Millevoi
Artists of all kinds have found Philadelphia a famously supportive and enthusiastic creative environment, with audiences hungry for the weirdest and wildest. Guitar pedal makers are no exception, and the Philadelphia area is home to one of the hottest burgeoning pedal-building communities. This weekend, the Philly Pedal Party, hosted at rock club Johnny Brenda’s, brought out a crew of pedal-makers showing off everything from the fiercest fuzzes to the deepest reaches of knob-twirling modulation.
Organizer Bram Johnson, a recent transplant who moved to town about a year ago after living in London and New York City, says Philly has “such a vibrant music scene. There’s so many cool builders and so much happening.” While bigger guitar shows come through the area and bring people from much farther and and wider, Johnson was inspired to curate a show that just focused on pedal builders from the region.
Fuzzrocious Delivers Fun at Your Feet
Fuzzrocious’ Ryan Ratajski displayed some of his latest work.
Fuzzrocious’ colorful tone manglers have been a long-time standby in the Philly pedal scene. Owner Ryan Ratajski had some of their latest works on hand in the form of a line of re-designed pedals in smaller enclosures with an innovative elevated third footswitch. Located at the top of the pedal and positioned high enough to avoid accidental knob clicks or twists, it’s a control for various options, depending on the effect.
All hail the Cat King!
In the case of their new Cat King, the momentary switch activates a feedback control, providing a gateway to interactive noise generation that you probably won’t want to stop messing with. For this line, priced at just $180, Ratajski promises, “I’m gonna try and put as many cool things in a small box and not charge you more for it.”
Feature-ful Fuzz
The DTF, Smalls, and Awkward Mustache, from Voltic.
Voltic Electronic Devices’ dynamic, feature-ful fuzzes are becoming standbys on local pedalboards. Their flagship is the DTF (dual-transistor fuzz) that owner and fuzz-master John-Anthony DeMaio explains is like a Harmonic Percolator going into a MOSFET boost. Anyone stopping by the Voltic table got a taste of their recent Smalls Fuzz—inspired by the Sam Ash Fuzz and the Analog Man Astrotone—and a coming-soon smaller version of the 3-knob, 2-switch Awkward Mustache op-amp fuzz. “I try to do a one-off for every show,” says DeMaio, and he delivered with a Ram’s Head build (with hip bowling bowl knobs) that was up for grabs.
Weird and Wobbly from Woolly
Woolly had the latest from his Champion Leccy line on diplay.
Champion Leccy owner Woolly has created a world of lo-fi weirding modules that are full of surprises. The Skitzy borrows elements from his chorus/tape-delay combo platter the Woozy and fits it into a dual reverb, dosing one side with pitch and warble controls, the other with tremolo and phase-cancelation tremolo, and a host of other options. On his vibrant, colorful board, he also offered a sneak peek at his not-yet-released Kilter, an effects-loop modulator that promises a world of oddball options.
One for Steve Albini
Vaderin’s fuzz-friendly board delivers some familiar imagery on various flavors of grit, from the Big Muff-inspired Super Ram—which includes a useful gate control—to their Steve Albini-inspired Harmonic Percolator offering, covered in X’s.
Bonus Guitar!
This Sturner Hazzard has an ash body with a maple neck and fretboard.
Sure, it was a pedal show, but local builder James Sturner lives in the neighborhood, so he had some of his angular Sturner Guitars on hand. Here’s his Hazzard, loaded with Guitar Fetish pickups and a preamp
![Whores Rig Rundown [2024]](https://www.premierguitar.com/media-library/youtube.jpg?id=55366029&width=1245&height=700&quality=85&coordinates=0%2C0%2C0%2C0)
