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.
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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 and The Brag. I started I Heart Guitar in 2008. I've been playing guitar since I was 8 years old, and I've been writing for magazines since I was 18 (I'm 33 now). I've also worked as a guitar teacher (up to 50 students a week) and a setup tech. I live in Melbourne, Australia. You can check out my guitar playing at Reverbnation or on YouTube.
You can email me at iheartguitarblog@gmail.com