It didn’t take too long for Welsh guitarist Chris Buck to go from making YouTube videos to playing the legendary Royal Albert Hall. Earlier this year, he brought his band Cardinal Black to the U.S. for a short tour that included a stop at Nashville’s Basement East. That’s where PG’s John Bohlinger caught up with Buck before the gig for a look at what’s powering his blues-rock sound these days.
Buck’s trademark goldtop Yamaha Revstar is out for the rip, and he spared little space on his double-tiered pedalboard, but a special loaner Gibson and a modded Fender amp added some extra flair to the Nashville show.
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Built by Yamaha’s custom shop in Calabasas, California, this goldtop Revstar came to Buck during NAMM 2020. He likes that the newer style doesn’t have the “baggage” attached to it that a Strat or Les Paul does. This one was built mostly to typical RS502 specs, with two P-90 pickups, a 3-way selector switch, wraparound bridge, and a chambered body. Buck fits this one with Ernie Ball Mega Slinky strings (.0105-.048) and strikes it with Jim Dunlop Tortex 1.14mm picks—a choice he copped from his guitar hero Slash.
Black Bird
Buck was inspired by Rival Sons’ guitarist Scott Holiday to snag this Firebird-style Firehawk by French builder Springer, complete with a Vibrola system. It’s fitted with Sunbear Handwound pickups.
Loaner Les Paul
On his way into Nashville, Buck worried that he didn’t have a Revstar-style backup should his main axe go down, so he hit up Gibson’s Mark Agnesi for a suitable option. Agnesi came through with this 1958 Les Paul Junior Double Cut Reissue, a no-frills rock machine equipped with a single P-90 pickup.
Sweet Victory
Victory has helped Buck out on his American run by hooking him up with V40 Deluxe combos where they can. In Nashville, Buck ran the V40 in a dual-mono setup with a Fender Deluxe Reverb, which had been modded and loaned by Mythos Pedals’ Zach Broyles. The first channel emulates a Bassman sound, while channel two is classic Deluxe Reverb.
Two-Tier Tone Temple
Buck might’ve left his amps back home, but he made up for the absence with a shop’s worth of tone-sculpting tools. This stomp station houses two levels of pedals, with first in the chain being a classic Dunlop Cry Baby. Next is a ThorpyFX Electric Lightning, Buck’s signature drive pedal, then a 29 Pedals EUNA, Mythos Golden Fleece, Mythos Mjolnir, Mythos Air Lane Drive, Snouse BlackBox Overdrive 2, Great Eastern FX Co. Small SPeaker Overdrive, Analog Man King of Tone, Origin Effects Cali76, Universal Audio Golden Reverberator, and Keeley Katana.
Then comes Buck’s modulation section, starting with a Mooer Trelicopter and a Catalinbread Echorec. A Line 6 HX Stomp XL handles some more delay and reverb sounds, plus some chorus. A Universal Audio Starlight Echo Station and Boss RE-202 Space Echo finish off the chain. A GigRig G3 helps Buck switch things up without breaking a sweat. Bucks rests it all on a pair of Schmidt Array pedalboards.
Shop Chris Buck's Rig
Gibson 1958 Les Paul Junior Double Cut Reissue
Ernie Ball Mega Slinky Strings
Fender Deluxe Reverb
Dunlop Cry Baby
Origin Effects Cali76
Universal Audio Golden Reverberator
Keeley Katana
Catalinbread Echorec
Line 6 HX Stomp XL
Universal Audio Starlight Echo Station
Boss RE-202 Space Echo
Beautifully Constructed Deconstruction
Great Eastern hails from Cambridge, England—birthplace of the great Pink Floyd. And like the Floyd of old, Great Eastern has a clear affinity for provocative sounds. The company’s roster of effects is small but heavy on quality and substance and includes the much-too-modestly-named Small Speaker Overdrive and Design-A-Drive. The Focus Fuzz is built with the same sense of inventiveness and practicality that distinguishes those devices. Circuit construction is immaculately executed on through-hole board. And apart from a few hard-to-source parts, which we’ll get into later, the circuit looks easy to service if it fails. I suspect such incidents will be rare.
“The distortion is remarkable. It’s articulate and communicates individual string detail clearly, even at high-gain settings.”
The Focus Fuzz is more than well-built. It’s a clever effect that considers a lot of musical approaches and makes expression within different realms of gain and aggression easy. Apart from the cool fundamental fuzz voice—which so keenly splits the difference between Fuzz Face and Tone Bender—the real highlight of the Focus Fuzz circuit is the fuzz control, which also reduces bias voltage as gain is increased. The concurrent adjustment of the two tone ingredients is a huge part of what makes the Focus Fuzz sound so rich at lower fuzz volumes. And that’s a key difference between the Focus Fuzz and many classic circuits, which tend to get spitty and fractured at lower gain levels.
These boosted, overdriven, and sweetly distorted low- and mid-gain sounds are some of the Focus Fuzz’s finest voices. And within various, even slight adjustments of the gain and the focus control (which adds gain as you boost treble), you can find toothy Billy Gibbons tones, high octane jangle settings, punky grind, and many more shades of harmonically charged boost and drive. As for the Focus Fuzz in wide-open mode? Well, it’s a ripper. Lead tones are punky, focused, and white hot. Stooges riffs are explosive. And if you’re desperate to rage, the Focus Fuzz is beautiful therapy.
The Verdict
There’s only one bummer about the Focus Fuzz. It’s hard to find. Greeves initially limited production to 250 units—largely because the Russian invasion of Ukraine complicated sourcing the NOS transistors at the heart of the pedal. Greeves plans additional runs when he can obtain additional transistors. In the meantime, he's planning a silicon version that he can reliably keep in production.
However scarce the Focus Fuzz becomes, it’s worth seeking, buying, or borrowing. Because if you go into a session or a gig with unfamiliar backline or in new surroundings, the Focus Fuzz can be a source of much comfort and reassurance. If you’re patient enough to master the simple but complex relationships that can exist between the Focus Fuzz control array and the controls on your guitar, you can conjure scores of colorful treble-boosted, overdriven, distorted, and freak-fuzzed tones that can situate themselves boldly in a live or recorded setting. At around $285 at the time of this writing, the Focus Fuzz has a luxurious price tag, but its range and utility make the price seem relatively modest.
