My Thoughts On Fuzz

In my ideal setup I would only have one amp. The base of any good amp is its clean sound and if it sounds good really clean then it stands to reason that if you start adding to it, it would still retain some sound that's pleasant (hopefully).

Enter gain.

I enjoy almost any genre of music but as far as guitar playing goes, there's basically four stages I like to play in: no gain at all with a very jazzy clean sound, some gain but not a ridiculous amount like what you hear in most rockabilly or Texas blues, punk-ish gain where there's a higher level of treble and a more buzzsw-ey tone best displayed by my favorite punk band Alkaline Trio and then metal. I wouldn't say that Slipknot is what jumps to mind when I think of good metal tone though they're one of my favorite metal bands (an odd one that group because when you start peeling away its nine members I don't like them nearly as much, the guitar tone isn't something to die over, the personalities aren't very fetching, but when t's all together I like it. A lot.). No, if I were to have to come up with a good example of a metal tone I'd have to say... I don't know. So many bands tune down further than I would or their tone isn't really that great and the attitude is there to make up for it.

Jeez. I didn't plan on something so hard coming into this while I'm writing this blog. Most of this was well thought out beforehand.

Hmmmm. OK. If pressed, as I am right now, I'd say that the guitar tone on Marilyn Manson's Anti-Christ Superstar album was pretty great. The Beautiful People in particular had a good tone.

Anyhoo, my attitude toward pedals: I don't look at fuzz boxes as shades of the same basic tone. Transparency isn't really a big thing for me because when you boil it down I like pedals to act more like pre amps than pedals as most people think of them. I'd rather have one amp, a punk-ish sounding pedal acting as a pre amp (the Seymour Duncan Twin Tube Classic does a pretty great job of this), a metal sounding box (the Duncan Twin Tube Mayhem would no doubt satisfy, I mean, just watch the video on their web site!), and a regular TS9 copy like my Digitech Bad Monkey (the only pedal overdrive box that would be treated as a pedal in my arsenal). With those three, I'd be able to have my four stages of gain, footswitchable at my whim to cover any particular genre with little worry and no knob turning.

This is different than the usual attitude of trying to make your amp sound better. The amp I want will no doubt sound great as-is with no help needed. Can you see how my attitude's a bit different? I think it is. I want an amp in a box to satisfy my desires for drastically different tones without having to lug around four different amps.

Anyhoo, that's my attitude toward it.