
The pedal stacks hard clipping with soft clipping and adds an overdriven transistor.
Boutique pedal company McGregor Pedals has launched its third pedal: The Cozmic Fuzzball. It follows on the heels of the McGregor's previous pedals, the Crunch Transparent Overdrive, a single-channel, low-gain overdrive pedal for guitar and bass, released in December 2019 and the Crunch Plus Overdrive, a medium-gain version for guitar and bass released in December 2020.
Designed and built by Garth Heslop, the brand new Cozmic Fuzzball pedal is built on the same foundation as the previous two pedals, though you would never know it. Heslop takes it to the next level by stacking hard clipping with soft clipping and adding an overdriven transistor for that sweet fuzz tone. Beginning with the attack control on minimum the Cozmic Fuzzball delivers distortion with a bright creamy edge. As you bring up the attack the distortion gets heavier; by noon on the attack, you have already started to hear fuzz layered in. Both the fuzz and the sustain grow from there. The Cozmic Fuzzball was designed for both guitar and bass.
McGregor Pedals - Cozmic Fuzzball - Demo by Michael Schau
The Cozmic Fuzzball has a straightforward control set:
·Attack: This controls strength of the signal hitting the fuzz transistor; more attack = more fuzz and sustain. At the lower end with low output pickups the effect is mild distortion/overdrive. As you bring up the attack the distortion gets stronger. Soon you will hear fuzz starting to layer in. Pin the Attack and you are in fuzz-land. The output of your pickups will have a significant effect on how much fuzz is generated (as will your guitar's volume pot)
·Tone: this is a variable high pass filter; the left side of the range is more for bass guitar, the right for both bass and guitar.
·Vol: This attenuates the amplified and clipped signal after it leaves the tone filter.
·LED Brightness (Unmarked Trimpot on the side): Please make the adjustment gently using a jeweler's screwdriver.
Key Cozmic Fuzzball features:
Hand soldered in Vancouver, Canada
High grade components picked for their superior sound and response
True bypass with soft-click switch
Standard 9-volt DC center-negative power operation (no battery compartment)
Top-mounted audio jacks and power input to help with packed pedal boards
The Cozmic Fuzzball is currently priced at $210 and can be purchased directly from the McGregor Pedals online store via mcgregorpedals.com.
It’s almost over, but there’s still time to win! Enter Stompboxtober Day 30 for your shot at today’s pedal from SoloDallas!
The Schaffer Replica: Storm
The Schaffer Replica Storm is an all-analog combination of Optical Limiter+Harmonic Clipping Circuit+EQ Expansion+Boost+Line Buffer derived from a 70s wireless unit AC/DC and others used as an effect. Over 50 pros use this unique device to achieve percussive attack, copious harmonics and singing sustain.
Does the guitar’s design encourage sonic exploration more than sight reading?
A popular song between 1910 and 1920 would usually sell millions of copies of sheet music annually. The world population was roughly 25 percent of what it is today, so imagine those sales would be four or five times larger in an alternate-reality 2024. My father is 88, but even with his generation, friends and family would routinely gather around a piano and play and sing their way through a stack of songbooks. (This still happens at my dad’s house every time I’m there.)
Back in their day, recordings of music were a way to promote sheet music. Labels released recordings only after sheet-music sales slowed down on a particular song. That means that until recently, a large section of society not only knew how to read music well, but they did it often—not as often as we stare at our phones, but it was a primary part of home entertainment. By today’s standards, written music feels like a dead language. Music is probably the most common language on Earth, yet I bet it has the highest illiteracy rate.
Developed specifically for Tyler Bryant, the Black Magick Reverb TB is the high-power version of Supro's flagship 1x12 combo amplifier.
At the heart of this all-tube amp is a matched pair of military-grade Sovtek 5881 power tubes configured to deliver 35-Watts of pure Class A power. In addition to the upgraded power section, the Black Magick Reverb TB also features a “bright cap” modification on Channel 1, providing extra sparkle and added versatility when blended with the original Black Magick preamp on Channel 2.
The two complementary channels are summed in parallel and fed into a 2-band EQ followed by tube-driven spring reverb and tremolo effects plus a master volume to tame the output as needed. This unique, signature variant of the Black Magick Reverb is dressed in elegant Black Scandia tolex and comes loaded with a custom-built Supro BD12 speaker made by Celestion.
Price: $1,699.
Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine is one of the loudest guitarists around. And he puts his volume to work creating mythical tones that have captured so many of our imaginations, including our special shoegaze correspondent, guitarist and pedal-maestro Andy Pitcher, who is our guest today.
My Bloody Valentine has a short discography made up of just a few albums and EPs that span decades. Meticulous as he seems to be, Shields creates texture out of his layers of tracks and loops and fuzz throughout, creating a music that needs to be felt as much as it needs to be heard.
We go to the ultimate source as Billy Corgan leaves us a message about how it felt to hear those sounds in the pre-internet days, when rather than pull up a YouTube clip, your imagination would have to guide you toward a tone.
But not everyone is an MBV fan, so this conversation is part superfan hype and part debate. We can all agree Kevin Shields is a guitarists you should know, but we can’t all agree what to do with that information.