Well DUH!: Is that why classic fuzzes are always so thin sounding?

[Mark Hammer]

Just got back from a very pleasant afternoon in Montreal at the Musician and Musical Instrument Show (http://www.simmm.ca/accueil_en.aspx), where I got to meet Robert Godin, run into Jennifer Batten and have a pleasant chat with Jeff Babicz about his bizarre string anchoring system and adjustable-height necks.  I also got to try out a Suhr guitar equipped with one of those nifty new patented dummy coils built into the backplate of the standard Strat whammy cavity.  Like any dummy coil, they don't work perfectly (a quick placement of the guitar near the amp's transformer demonstrated that), but they work well enough and are a breeze to install.

Coming home with my workmate, I was explaining how the thing works to him.  At the same time, we were listening to "Randy's Vinyl Tap" on CBC, and Randy Bachman was explaining (and boy is that a poor choice of word for what he was doing) distortion effects.  And then it hit me......like a ton of bricks.

You know how all those classic fuzzes seem to have not enough bottom and people are always fattening them up with bigger input caps?  Okay, now think how many classic instruments from the 60's probably had hum-rejecting pickups.  Okay, now think about how much gain needs to be added to a signal to get it to distort.  Okay, now think about what happens when yhou apply that much gain to a signal NOT coming from a guitar with humbucking pickups.  Get the picture?

I have no idea why it took me so long to realize that classic fuzzes were likely designed to remove the bottom at the input so as to filter out any hum before it got heavily amplified.

[jonathan perez]

thats makes ALOT of sense to me now.

i had a "classic" fuzz that sounded AWESOME!

oops...anyways, i bought a clone of it and it sounded HUGE, in a bad way.

and so i decided to get rid of it and try another clone, and that too had HUGE low end that was almost annoying.

but i always back to my "classic" fuzz because it was always just right.

guess there is nothing like the original anything.

[RedHouse]

WTF?

Hmmm, must have been the refreshments...

Doesn't jive with  me as to why a Fuzzface with a 2.2uF input cap sounds so much better (both Humbucking and Single Coil) with a .1uF, or better yet .068uF

In fact I'd have to say just the opposite, the classic fuzz tone had way too much bass, untill you roll off the volume a touch then it brightens up and de-fuzzes.

Must have been cool listening to Randy Bachman.

(with all due respect of course)

[SolderBoy]

Hey I'm a bass player, so my very first mods were making guitar pedals (classic or otherwise) work without the roll-offs.  On basses, I was winding hum cancelling pickups and improving shielding and earthing arrangements too.  Where I am its 50Hz, but its still high enough to be annoying...


I often wish they designed 10 or 15 Hz mains power for cities...

Light bulbs might be a bit annoying though...

[gez]

Hmmm, not sure Mark.  Most noise interference is 'high' frequency.  Making an input cap slightly smaller isn't going to kill it.

Fuzzes just don't sound like fuzzes with gobs of bass, you just don't get that sound IMO.

[brett]

Hi.
This is an interesting one....
There certainly is a fatter sound with humbuckers into pedals like the fuzzface and the RM Axis. 

But the fuzzface has a cutoff frequency on the input of only a few Hz.  The output cutoff is really low, too.  In fact, most of these old pedals used either a big electrolytic output cap (2.2uF was common) or a large value pot (often 500kA), presumably because valve amps used lots of 500k and 1M pots.

So what else could be affecting the tone?  The higher output impedance of humbucking pickups might be a factor because it is a major cause of signal loss going into these low input impedance pedals.  The top end seems to get lost first, though I'm not sure of the reason.  Another possible cause is the quality of guitar leads.  Today's low capacitance leads weren't around.  Many amps had high input impedance, so lots of treble could be lost.  For example, Jimi H had those "terrible" coil leads.  They would have seriously diminished the top end of anything he played, and made for his killer mid-upper tone.

cheers

[Mark Hammer]

Well, I don't wish to convey the impression that classic fuzz inputs were configured ONLY to keep out 60hz hum, merely that it was a sort of perk we tend not to think about in an era of well-shielded everything and humbuckers or noise-reducing pickups of virtually every type and form-factor.

The "genius" of pedals like the MXR Distortion+ and DOD250 was that they tended to cut out more of the bass as the gain was increased, so that bass cut tracked risk-of-irritating-hum.  Nowadays, tonally, we're not all that crazy about it, but my point is that we have the luxury of being able to think about it in purely tonal terms as opposed to "Do I want a thick distorted sound or can I put up with the hum?"

I'd be a fool, though, not to acknowledge that inputs tended to attenuate the bass not only because of stylistic differences 35-40 years ago (think Fender Jaguar through a CBS-era solid-state amp), or hum-reduction, but also because the bass end is where the highest amplitude part of the signal lives, wound strings and all of that.  As the Tube Screamer amply demonstrated, a more consistent distortion sound could be achieved if one created a level playing field in the clipping stage by attenuating the bass on input.  Admittedly, that isn't what I'd call a "fuzz", but the general principle is the same: there are many reasons to *want* to cut bass on input to a fuzz, both practical and aesthetic.  It was listening to all those early 60's artists on the Randy Bachman show, most playing through single coil instruments, and my experience playing the dummy-coil-equiped Suhr guitar into a Diezel amp set for high gain, that reminded me how different the playing context of musicians trying to use fuzz in the 60's was from our current playing context.