Playing with a fuzz pedal between your guitar and your amplifier is not for the faint of heart. Fuzz is, by no means, a subtle effect. On the contrary, what it does best is call mayhem and bring it on the stage through the speaker of your amp.
Yes, from Jimi Hendrix to Josh Homme, to David Gilmour, fuzz has been used to play all kinds of music and get diverse tones. Well, I’ve been playing with my Russian Big Muff for well over a decade and can tell you a thing or two about tuning it for different scenarios.
Ready or not, it’s time to get heavy.
Table of Contents
The Big Muff, An Era-Defining Pedal
The Electro-Harmonix Big Muff isn’t the first fuzz pedal in history. There are many examples of bands playing with the Vox-made Tone Bender or the Dallas Arbiter Face Fuzz (now reissued by Dunlop), and even earlier the Maestro FZ-1 Fuzz Tone, the one that Richards played in “Satisfaction”.
The Big Muff was released in 1969 and there’s a huge difference between that circuit and the one all the other brands were using at the time. With the epic entrance of the Big Muff into the market, the sound of fuzz changed.
What was a pedal sensitive to the guitar’s volume control changed into letting mayhem escape from the innards of the planet. Arguably, and believe me, there’s a lot of arguing about it, it’s the silicone transistor rather than the germanium one, more common at the time.
The doom-oriented amounts of gain and huge boosted sound defined the ‘70s and much of what we call heavy and creamy tone today. Although the original Big Muff is no longer available, there’s the Green Russian Big Muff Pi pedal and several others (USA-made) still selling in huge numbers today.
The Russian Big Muff
When Electro-Harmonix moved production to Russia (you can check out why here, it’s a long story) they made the first Russian Big Muff. These were not only made in Russia but also with Russian parts. Therefore, they inevitably sound different from all the Big Muffs he had been building until then.
The characteristics of the Russian Big Muff tone are that it’s bass-rich and very compressed with huge lows and insane amounts of gain. It’s not too bitey and it doesn’t propel the mids so powerfully forward. On the contrary, the darkness of the tone gathers around the low mids and makes a rumbling, thick, compact fuzz tone.
You might have heard it fueling the awe-inspiring, jaw-dropping, tasteful bends David Gilmour plays so often. That creamy, thick, lead tone comes from one of the early Russian Big Muffs.
The Silver Big Muff Pi
The Russian Big Muff is very famous because of its green exterior and larger-than-life enclosure. Well, the silver model of the Big Muff manufactured in New York is even larger, and although it’s based on the same premises, sounds very different.
This model of the Big Muff is not only more ferocious-sounding, but it also has a brighter, sharper high-end that’s hard to tame to avoid shrillness.
That said, when coupled with a guitar that has single-coil or P-90 pickups, it becomes this amazing razorblade that can fill an arena but also cut through anything.
In case you’re wondering and need an example, the Big Muff Pi was the pedal that Jack White played through his entire White Stripes era. The res-o-glass guitar had single-coil under the humbucker covers and the guitar sounded huge, to say the least.
Some Cool Sounds & Settings
As a Different Distortion Pedal
The first sound we need to cover is the break-it-all setting as I call it. In this setting, your fuzz pedal transforms into that take-no-prisoner sound for choruses, riffing, and playing distorted verses. It’s your second flavor for distortions.
You can put a Tube Screamer before it and it will thicken the sound even more, making your guitar more full and round.
For this scenario, I think the Russian Big Muff works best.
Settings
- Level: 6
- Tone: 5
- Sustain: 7
As a Stand-Alone Mayhem Creator
Using your Big Muff a-la Jack White is a great choice if you want to use your fuzz as an all-or-nothing pedal. This means going from clean to full-on broken in the time it takes to step on a pedal.
I think the best pedal for this scenario is the silver Big Muff Pi because it’s the one that sounds the most ferocious and also the one that adds the most in the upper-mids.
The notes you play will be more discernible for the public and you can play some fast, heavy riffing maintaining clarity. This is especially true for guitars with single-coil pickups.
Settings
- Level: 8
- Tone:4
- Sustain: 9
For Leads and Solos
You can use the Big Muff to thicken your solo tone. The one catch here is that you have to work dynamics and noise very well. Yes, when you turn on a pedal that’s as hot and mean as a Big Muff, you’ll get a loud buzzing noise.
You can either know your way around it and never let your playing cover that sound or you can use a noise gate.
In both cases, it has a learning curve. That said, your leads go to an entirely new place when you couple it with a Tube Screamer and an analog delay. In this scenario, in my opinion, the Russian Big Muff’s low-tuned and silky tone works best.
Settings
- Level: 6
- Tone: 3
- Sustain: 8
For Broken, Gated Sounds
Can you use a fuzz pedal as a clean boost and get that broken, fuzzy, small, thick, treble-oriented tone you’ve heard a million times? Of course, you can. While I admit that’s a tone that’s closer to the Tone Bender and Fuzz Face, you can totally do it with the Big Muff.
Furthermore, if you couple it with an octave pedal (if it’s monophonic even better), and play with the gain knob on the pedal and the volume knob of your guitar, you can get some exciting sounds.
Finally, you can drop the noise gate in after that and get that gated sound that’s so cool. In my opinion, for this scenario, the best Big Muff is the silver one.
Settings
- Level: 3
- Tone: 9
- Sustain: 6
How to Integrate Fuzz to Your Current Setup?
I know what you might be thinking: I want to play with fuzz but how can I fit the fuzz pedal here? Well, don’t worry because it’s the 21st century, and fuzz pedals have gotten much smaller.
So, having a fuzz pedal on your pedalboard won’t deprive you of much pedalboard real estate (which we know is scary). I use it after all the gain stages and feed directly into the delay pedal. I get that creamy Gilmour-esque sound and also the mayhem I need.
Also, if your question goes more like “I want to use fuzz but it’ll never fit my band/playing style”. Well, if that’s the case, let me tell you that a fuzz pedal, using the advice above, can give you many different tones. Plus, you can come up with cool combinations of your own and forge something like “your sound” with it.
Believe me, it’s a golden ticket to many different tones full of personality and power.
Fuzz and Guitar Pickups
The pickups on your guitar affect the way a fuzz pedal works. That’s just a fact of life, fuzzes are wild creatures and work in mysterious ways.
So, as a rule of thumb, I would say that the hotter the pickups on your guitar, the less fuzz-friendly it is. On the other hand, guitars with single-coil pickups or P-90s shine, bite, and growl through fuzz pedals.
For example, my Fender Mustang, a guitar with a very small-sounding bridge pickup, sounds humongous and everything sounds crisp and understandable.
My ’81 Ibanez (with scorching hot humbuckers), on the other hand, loses volume and sinks below a layer of too much gain (we know, kids, there’s no such thing as too much gain).
So, bear this in mind and try it with more than one ax or pickup combination before making up your mind whether you like it or not.
Why Play with Fuzz?
Before wrapping this up, let me tell you something about fuzz pedals in general.
All fuzz pedals have a sound of their own, but all fuzzes work in a certain sonic landscape. Therefore, regardless of the one you choose, you work within a specific territory.
In other words, buying a fuzz pedal when you want to sound like a Mesa-Boogie Triple Rectifier is a waste of time and money. Fuzzes don’t sound like that, there’s a raw element in their nature that’s closer to rock and roll than it is to metal.
That said, there’s a plethora of crossover genres. All of those out there who, just like yours truly here, love stoner rock, and bands like Queens of The Stone Age, Mastodon, and early Black Sabbath can get that grainy, rocking, heavy sound from a Big Muff.
You can think of the Jimi Hendrix rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” on Woodstock. That’s a great example.
Also, the groovy riffs Dan Auerbach plays in the Black Keys are mostly a fuzz pedal through an antic with tubes.
But that’s not all, because, following the advice above, you can make a Big Muff roar, purr, or growl by just turning the knobs.
Distortion vs. Fuzz
Making this differentiation is a must when looking for your next pedal.
Distortion is modern-sounding, less grainy; closer to a wall of sound. Those pedals imitate the sound of a tube amplifier maxed out and at the peak of its capacities, adding gain to that.
As a result, what you have is a thick, menacing, compressed signal coming out of the speaker.
Fuzz, on the other hand, sounds like that same amplifier but with a rattling cabinet and a blown transformer doing its best to survive. It doesn’t sound like a natural result of pushing something too hard. On the contrary, it purposely alters the original signal drastically.
As a result, the sound is huge, usually with a very bassy low-end, and sky’s-the-limit levels of gain at disposal. Most fuzz pedals come with a powerful filter in the tone knob. It’s a must for navigating such high-gain territories.
Closing Thoughts
Playing with a fuzz pedal on your pedalboard is a constant invitation to mayhem. I know that, and by now, you know that too. That said, it can also transform into many other things like a different taste for your distorted tones, a creamy tone for your soaring leads, or even an exotic flavor for your overdriven licks.
Also, if you like a guitar riff, try it again with a fuzz pedal on; you might like it even better.
So, if you haven’t already, go and try a Big Muff out (check out all the currently available variants), you might enter a new era of your playing and dare to go to unknown sonic territories. Who knows, it might get your best playing out of you.
Happy (fuzzed-out) playing!
