Guitar pedals are wonderful things. They enable us to augment the sound of an amplifier that we might be intimately familiar or completely bored with into something fresh and exciting. But they can also just add noise and serve to destroy instead of enhance your tone.
Fortunately one sometimes comes across specimens that are inherent things of beauty. They possess soul and spirit and were obviously made with love and care. Enter Z.Vex Effects, the Minneapolis, Minnesota-based company who has been supplying the world of guitardom with hand-made, beautifully crafted effects pedals since 1999.
Fuzz Factory
The Fuzz Factory is a deadly beast. It will create fuzz sounds that you only dreamed of because as stated in the release notes rather understatedly, it is pedal designed to “shape you a personalised fuzz”. What first caught my eye when reading the release notes was that the pedal employs two new old-stock germanium transistors from the 60’s. Opinions are varied on the use of this material but suffice it to say that they have been described as “smooth” and “warm”.
The Fuzz Factory is indeed everything that is claimed, and more. It has five knobs attached to its hand-silk screen surface and they are, respectively:
Volume – output level.
Gate – squelches noise after end of sustain.
Compression – adds attack characteristic when turned to left, which gets softer to right.
Drive – increases distortion when used as a “normal” fuzz, and adjusts feedback pitch and tonal thickness.
Stability – supply voltage. Use to control feedback pitch.
As you can see, it’s not merely a case of turning up the “gain” or “fuzz” knob. More precise control of the fundamentals of what makes a fuzz a fuzz is offered and these controls are wrapped up in words that we are familiar with. But as Mr. Vex says, “Although the five knobs are named for the parameters over which they seem to have the most control, please don’t hold me to it. They are controls for various operating levels and biases.”
After giving the pedal a whirl my ears were immediately met with an onslaught of delivered promises and a fantastic palette of fuzz sculptors’ delight. The Gate and Stability parameters are particularly fun and the party started at “set to annihilate”. I went from there on to “razor death” and finally “total devastation fuzz slaughterfest”. You make up your own.
Box of Rock
The Box of Rock is a pretty standard drive pedal with a classic demeanour and a couple of tricks up its sleeve. It was designed to emulate the preamp sound of a Marshall JTM45 at “10” and it is highly recommended by Mr. Vex that you try it with a Marshall at least once. It employs a “high-headroom, unity-50X gain booster with nominal input impedance and low hiss”, not to mention, like all Z Vex pedals, it employs a 100% true bypass.
What is great about this pedal is that it is essentially a two channel device. It has two footswitches; one that engages the distortion circuit and one that engages a boost for solos, etc. On the other hand, you could feasibly use the boost channel as the “clean” channel as it does alter the clean tone of your amp when engaged. The results when I tried this were a firmer bottom and a smoother midrange extending into the top end.
Put another way, I preferred it to the standard sound of the amplifiers (a Laney Lionheart L5T-112) clean channel. The pedal has four knobs and, in contrast to the Fuzz Factory pedal, they are pretty straight forward:
Drive
Tone
Vol.
Boost: Sets the boost level, which is engaged with the left stomp switch.
I found the distortion really pleasing and smooth and best suited to, well, rock, but it could easily be set to accommodate blues or similar styles where huge amounts of gain are not a necessity. There was nothing harsh about this pedal and it’s safe to say that it is a modern classic and safe to use in place of your classic Tube Screamer or DS-1.
Conclusion
Z Vex effects pedals are truly soulful. The fact that they are all hand-made is also a part of their allure and when you plug them in their quality shines through and it becomes obvious where the money goes. I for one am a sucker when it comes to these boutique-style pedals and I’m sure you will be too, once you hear them.
REVIEW: Greg Bester
Suggested Retail Price: Fuzz Factory – R 1,995 | Box of Rock – R 2,295
Supplier: Tuerk Music Technologies | Tel: (011) 792 8402 | www.tuerkmusic.co.za
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