Fuzz for Players Who Hate Fuzz

I’m not a fuzz person. Generally, when I try to like a fuzz pedal, I get tired really quickly and do something else. I wouldn’t say that I “hate” fuzz, just that over several decades, I never liked fuzz. Thus as much as I respect the fellows at That Pedal Show, an “All You Need is Fuzz” shirt is never going in my shopping cart.

Look back a few articles and you will see that I finally found an analog fuzz pedal that I liked enough to buy, that being the Wampler Velvet Fuzz. In that space, I still like it best.

However, I recently finished an experiment with a fuzz that is quite outside the fuzz box if you will. And that experiment has me excited!

Fuzzes as we know use either Germanium or Silicon chips to produce a very hard clipping circuit. The original Maestro Fuzz and the now insanely priced Tone Bender units have incredibly simple circuits. Electronics are not magical and while some chipsets produce different results, the same chips will provide the same results within the limits of QA applied during chip manufacture. All Tone Benders are not great, and betwixt us, I don’t really care for the sound of any of them, regardless of whether guitar inspiration James Patrick Page used one or not. But what if your fuzz uses tubes instead of transistors? Existentially is it still a fuzz?

I don’t engage in semantic arguments, I play stuff and like it or not. Simple. I had heard that the brilliant Simon Jarrett from Kingsley Amplification was working on a new pedal that would do fuzz, based on tubes, and when it releases, he promised to let me know. But I recently wrote a piece on the Blackbird preamp from Effectrode Thermionic, and noted that I was also very pleased with their Fire Bottle Tube Boost (always on for single coils) and PC-2A Tube Compressor. Both of those devices are on my Wet/Dry/Wet setup and they not only sound great, there is real tube warmth there, they are not all clinical and soulless.

So as I do, I went back to the Effectrode website to see what else these fine folks were making, in case that I might be missing something. To my surprise, I discovered that I had missed that Effectrode made a tube fuzz. Not cheap, but certainly less than myriad Tone Bender clones, and would, I hoped, not make noises that make my teeth and brain hurt. So I contacted my Effectrode dealer Electric Mojo Guitars and owner Charles advised me that he did not stock the device but could order one for me. Three weeks later, it arrived.

I then took ill, and spent time involuntarily in a hospital bed, and funny enough, hospitals frown on guitars, amplifiers and fuzz pedals so I had to wait a bit to get out and start playing.

Wowsers! This pedal does what I want from a fuzz! The fuzz is rich and creamy, not gated or spitty. It doesn’t get as gritty as most transistor fuzzes that I have tried and for me that means that I have a lot more fine control over the sound of the fuzz.

How It Works

It’s incredibly simple. You have an on/off switch that is super quiet, a volume control to manage the output level and a fuzz control to manage the fuzz. Between the input and output jacks, placed properly on the top side (as IMO all jacks should be placed) there is a small Bias switch. The center position is centre bias and the other options are cold bias and warm bias. Personally I prefer the centre position but I credit Effectrode for offering options. The pedal powered by a 12v 1.5a power supply that comes with the unit. Use the supplied power supply folks, the tube runs at plate voltage and your other power supply system is unlikely to provide the needed amperage at 12V. As always, RTFM (read the fine manual), it’s only 4 pages long.

Internally the Mercury Fuzz uses a 6948 hand selected NOS tube to bring the voltage to 300V internally. This is the game changing start because there is no 9V battery driving a transistor. Instead the tube creates the power to drive the NOS Germanium Crystal Diodes to perform the clipping that fuzz requires. To me it sounds both better and different to transistor only based fuzzes. Do not that the Mercury Fuzz is a limited run unit due to the scarcity of the needed tubes and diodes, so if you can get one, get one now, don’t wait until they are no longer available.

Designer Phil Taylor, IMO a really brilliant fellow who understands tubes better than most, named the pedal after the NASA Mercury program that put American astronauts in space, and he specifically notes John Glenn as inspiration. For those who have opportunity to visit the National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC, there is a Mercury space capsule there for you to see. There is a graphic of a Mercury capsule on the pedal as well.

The picture posted here is from the Smithsonian exhibit and is the ship called Friendship 7 that was piloted for three orbits by astronaut John Glenn.

My Test Environment

For my evaluation and obvious decision to keep the Mercury Fuzz, I used my Suhr Modern S guitar. I have had it about twelve years and it is the dual humbucker configuration. Each pickup can be independently coil split. I am a fan of Suhr products because they do the things that I would do if I had any competency in building a guitar. For the record, I have no such competency. The Suhr pickups have wonderful tone and are not overly hot. Turned up all the way they sound great with or without fuzz, but even with the Mercury fuzz engaged, the tone was there without any of the noises that bug me. Even better, when I roll off the volume, the sound cleans up very nicely, and by experimenting with the settings on the Mercury you have a wide range of tonality available through your guitar volume control without having to disengage the fuzz.

The fuzz comes first in the signal chain, then there is the Effectrode Fire Bottle Boost, a Protein Overdrive, a RAT and then the Effectrode PC-2A compressor. At this point the signal gets split with the primary signal going to the dry amp, a Fender 1959 Bassman reissue. The secondary signal goes to a Strymon Lex Rotary pedal and then splits into stereo out of the Lex before hitting the UA Astra Modulation Machine pedal, the UA Starlight Echo Machine and finally the UA Golden Reverberator. Each channel then goes to its own Fender Hot Rod Deluxe IV. Those amps are set identically and have their built in reverb set to what Dan Steinhardt calls “base reverb”, where you know its there but its not obvious. The wet amps also receive the signal from before the initial split. Frankly the whole setup sounds glorious and with the Mercury in place, I don’t think that I am missing any opportunities.

Summary

I’ve also put my 1960 Custom Shop Les Paul and my Fender Eric Johnson Strat through this setup and in every case using only the Mercury have been very pleased with what I am hearing. I recommend the Effectrode Mercury at the top of my very short fuzz list.

Of interest, I did get by ordering the day of announcement one of the joint fuzzes from Macarrie / Boss, their Wazacraft Tone Bender. It is a lovely recreation of the 1.5 Tone Bender, but to be blunt, it went back in the box because I like the Mercury Fuzz so much more.

Thanks for reading and until next time, peace.