Fuzz Faces
The Fuzz Face is a difficult beast to tame. It's sound is fat, sloppy and politically incorrect. The radio frequency interference is so strong that you would think it came right out of "This is Spinal Tap". The modern incarnations of this pedal sound vastly different from the 60's versions. Today's reissues are thinner sounding and have less gain. The Dunlop edition is terrible due to circuity added in an effort to remove radio pickup.
When the guitar's volume control is fully open, the effect is very smooth and fat due to the extremely low input impedance which cuts off most of the high frequencies. Rolling down the pot to halfway brightens up the sound considerably and is good for rhythm playing.
You should never use a buffer or any Boss, Ibanez, or any other active (FET) switching pedal before the Fuzz Face, since this will drastically alter the tone and gain . Avoid the newer Dunlop buffered wahs as well. Older Cry Baby and Vox wahs, however, need to be modified in order to operate properly when used together with the Fuzz Face.
2 comments:
Bonjour Rick,
À la suite de ton article sur le Fuzz Face, as-tu une recommandations à
faire concernant les différents "clones" que l'on retrouve sur la marché?
Fulltone, Voodoo labs, etc...
Les "vrais" sont hors de prix... Étrangement, j'aime bien le son du Fuzz
"bleu" ,apparemment avec un transistor en silicone plutôt que le germanium.
Merci!
Philippe L.
Well, Philippe, I've tried the Dallas Arbiter reissue model which is the red one that you see in the photo. It came with equiped with silicone BC109C transistors and was a lot tighter sounding than the old original grey one seen on the right of the photo (BC108C), although the tonal difference is not due to the transistors.
The Dunlop reissue that I tried was not quite right due to the rf filter but can easiliy be modified, as can any Fuzz Face. The other models that you refer to I have not yet tried, but, I would suggest that you listen to them first, as I suspect that they would sound quite different as well.
The Fuzz Face being a very simple circuit, you can change things around until you get them right. I prefer the sound of silicone tansistors to germanium ones, they are brighter but unfortunately more prone to rf. Many sites feature information on this pedal and you can try changing the transistors, and other components, to achieve some very different results.
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