Fuzz & Treble Booster

The tone of this thing is a great mix of wicked and beautiful. 3 huge silver germanium transistors (completely unmarked) yield huge sounds, which are very, very responsive to pickup and guitar volume settings. Works great with a wah in front, but the wah has to be buffered (like a 535Q) or it doesn't do its thing (very much like a Fuzz Face or Fuzz Factory, or for that matter, most germanium fuzzboxes).

It looks like a kit, but this thing is well built. Whoever built it took the idea of "point-to-point wiring" to an extreme: most of the components are just floating inside, directly connected to the next, on stiff wire and solder; very impressive.

Real easy from the get-go, and yet, there are surprising levels of complexity in this box. Here's the setup: 3 knobs: TREBLE, FUZZ INTENSITY and FUZZ BOOST; 2 footswitches: TREBLE BOOST  and FUZZ. Your mind has settled on a certain paradigm, given those controls, has it not? Mine did. When I first saw this, I was thinking I would get a kind of poor man's Bee Baa, or maybe a fuzzbox with a  separate, discrete treble boost in addition. But, no. The truth is so much better. Here's how it goes. With everything off, there's a bit of hiss bleeding through, not a lot, but you don't want that, so you hit the TREBLE BOOST, where the TREBLE knob controls the volume, which can get quite loud; the quality of sound here is very surprising for such a cheap-looking box--nice and clear, and not shrill at all, almost no undesireable noise. Then, you want fuzz, you hit the FUZZ switch and you get some beautiful germanium tones, where INTENSITY isn't intensity it's blend, and BOOST isn't boost, it's tone (not much range in tone--it goes from very dark to less dark--but I like it). (TREBLE doesn't do anything in this mode.) After all that, you want to escalate? Hit the TREBLE BOOST switch again and get a huge volume boost (seems to me that that switch should have been labeled TREBLE-SLASH-BOOST), and here again TREBLE does nothing, but INTENSITY controls the volume boost (so it overrides the blend you had before) and BOOST is still tone, so that doesn't change. So obviously this box has great performance potential, where you can go from nothing to controlled treble/volume boost to fuzz to louder fuzz--but, beware, one mistep and you go from nothing to out-of-control louder fuzz: if the TREBLE BOOST switch is off and you hit FUZZ it's full on. Pretty unusual setup.

N/A

I currently have 30 fuzzboxes (have previously had at least as many more), and this one ranks right up there in the top 5. I thought it was going to be a bit of a joke, and bought it really out of curiosity, and I was absolutely bowled over by it. Not only does it have versatility and a range of sounds, it has tone out the whazoo. No Fuzz Face or '69 pedal was ever going to have the combination of musicality AND extreme fuzz that this has (for me). It's a good raunchier alternative to a foxx Tone Machine or Roland Bee Baa. Mine says "made in USA" inside and out, but I've also seen the same box under the names of "Guilietti" (which could still be American) and "Goya" (which is Italian (or is it Swedish?), but it could still be American-made and European-sold). Good luck finding one, but if you do, I recommend it.