Zander Circuitry American Geek

The high gain fuzz machine.

Zander's tribute to one of the greatest circuits ever created, the mighty ‘Big Muff’ fuzz.

Fuzz addicts will no doubt know of the many variations of this circuit and the unofficial Monikers they have adopted through the years, each having its one subtle tonal differences to the others. Without wanting to burst anyone’s bubble, with the exception of the IC version the topology of the circuits are pretty much identical, the sonic differences each version is known for comes from the varying part values used in certain parts of the circuit, especially in the tone stack portion of the pedal.

Knowing this is where *most* of the differences lie, we decided to remove the simple tone control & make every part of the tone stack variable, allowing you to vary the bass, mid & treble characteristics of the fuzz interactively across four filter controls.

We’ve then added a 6 way rotary switch that lets you choose between various different clipping options for the diodes in the second gain stage, these are Germanium, Silicon (the standard ‘M’ fuzz sound), Red LEDs, MOSFET, Transistor & None. Across these 6 different options you can create vastly different and unusual tones that are still routed within the ‘M’ style fuzz ballpark.

On top of all of this we’ve included a second Max Gain footswitch which bypasses the gain control, allowing you to set up 2 levels of gain, a popular thing to do with a pedal like this is to dime the gain control, but you may not always want that much saturation, so now you can have both!

TECH SPECS:
Controls – Filter 1, Filter 2, Filter 3, Filter 4, Volume, Gain
Switches – Engage (bypass), Max Gain, 6-way clipping diode selector
Jacks – Top mounted in/out jacks
Power requirement – 9v DC Center Negative PSU
Current Draw – 10ma (approx)