COOL GEAR ALERT: New Dunlop Slash pedals
Whoa! Okay, two of my favourite effects are my octave pedal and an MXR Jimi Hendrix System Octave Fuzz. Looks like MXR and Slash have gone and combined their essences into one imposing chimera of tonal goodness in the form of the MXR Slash Octave Fuzz. This little box features fuzz tone with a separate Sub Octave voice and an Octave Up Fuzz, and in true Dunlop/MXR style it features even more tweakability than it initially appears: in addition to Volume, Tone, Fuzz, Sub Octave and Octave Up controls, there are also two internal trimpots to adjust the gain and tone of the Octave Up effect. Want! And there’s also a new Slash Cry Baby with a deeper voicing, which you know has gotta be cool – after all, Slash knows his way around a wah!
Dunlop Proudly Presents The MXR Slash Octave Fuzz & Slash Cry Baby Classic
NOW SHIPPING
Dunlop and Slash have teamed up to create a triad of products due out just ahead of the guitar legend’s latest album release, Apocalyptic Love.
With Slash’s own experimentation and input, we created two pedals to complement his raw, expressive sound: the MXR Slash Octave Fuzz and the Slash Cry Baby Classic. The Slash Octave Fuzz features a searing fuzz tone that can be combined with a separate sub octave voice and an octave up fuzz to thicken up your tone with a sinister growl. The Slash Cry Baby Classic is tuned to a lower frequency and features a custom-wound resonance inductor, giving this wah-wah a huge dynamic range and a wide sweep.
Eric Johnson Signature Fuzz Face now shipping
Aah, the Fuzz Face. They look great, they sound great, they’re entertainingly unpredictable, the transistors used in the originals seemed to be different depending on the day of the week they were made on, and they sometimes just flat out stopped working if they got too hot. Eric Johnson swears by them, and with the help of Dunlop’s Jeorge Tripps he’s created his ultimate Fuzz Face.
Dunlop Proudly Presents The Eric Johnson Signature Fuzz Face
NOW SHIPPING
Dunlop® is proud to announce the release of the Eric Johnson Signature Fuzz Face®.
No one cares more about tone than Eric Johnson, and his choice for getting sweet, singing lead tones is the Eric Johnson Signature Fuzz Face.
EJ worked closely with Fuzz Face guru Jeorge Tripps to create his signature pedal. It is inspired by EJ’s prized personal Fuzz Faces and is built to his incredibly strict specifications, featuring hand-selected BC183 silicon transistors (for higher gain), custom repro ’68-’69 knobs, and a vintage-style hammertone finish. The result: a beautifully dynamic, expressive, and powerful pedal.
REVIEW: Z.Vex Vexter Fuzz Factory
The Z Vex Fuzz Factory shot to legendary status almost instantly upon its release in the mid 90s. This was a rude, loud, dirty fuzz pedal in an era that was rapidly becoming overpopulated by high-gain valve heads, and before the boutique pedal boom had really hit its stride.
Initially only available in groovy hand-painted boxes, Z.Vex released the Vexter series a few years ago, which packs the same circuit as the newest hand-painted Fuzz Factories(including a DC power jack and on/off LED indicator) into a less labour-intensive screen-printed box to keep the cost down. Well, relatively down – it’s not a super-cheap pedal by any stretch of the wallet – which is kind of reassuring. If it’s true that you get what you pay for, I’d probably be a bit
Caught by the fuzz – or how I learned to stop battering my cranium and start loving germanium
I’m not sure when it happened. Some time between chaining a few distortion pedals and a graphic EQ together for pure evil Dimebag Darrell tone when I was 16, and my 27th birthday or thereabouts, I started to hear the call. Quiet at first, maybe a little distant and muffled, but definitely there. It got louder over the years, and increasingly raspier and sharper. Then before I knew it, there it was:
Fuzz.
I’m not sure why I hadn’t thought of it before. Maybe it was because I spent my teens in an era where amp distortion was king, and even pedal distortion was relatively frowned upon as being synthetic. Maybe it was because I thought of fuzz as, to paraphrase Dethklok, ‘grandpa’s distortion.’ But whatever mental roadblock was coming between me and glorious fuzz gradually started to shift, and now I can’t get enough of those little germanium or silicon-chipped wonders.
Hi! I'm Peter Hodgson. I write for Gibson.com, Australian Guitar, Australian Musician, Mixdown Magazine (including my instructional column, 'Unleash Your Inner Rock God,' which has been running since 2007), guitarworld.com, Tone Deaf, Beat (including their weekly hard rock/metal column Crunch) and The Brag. And I'm Assistant Social Coordinator with Seymour Duncan.
I've been playing guitar since I was 8 years old, and I've been writing for magazines since I was 18. I've also worked as a guitar teacher (up to 50 students a week), a setup tech, a newspaper editor, and I've also dabbled in radio a little bit. I live in Melbourne, Australia, and my hobbies include drinking way too much coffee, and eating way too much Mexican food.
You can check out my guitar playing at Reverbnation or on YouTube, and feel free to email me at iheartguitarblog@gmail.com