Distortion Man or Fuzz Man...?

[pelliott]

so for a good 2 years i was a fuzz man…starting with a regular Big Muff and climaxing in my BAT Sarcophagus…and i still love it…but recently i added a Fat Boost and OCD to my board, and those two together give me great distortion tone…and now I'm struggling to choose one, even for the same song...

I find myself doing the same thing. I always intend to sit down and focus on one sound instead of noodling/riffing endlessly clicking pedals on and off buuuuut... I'm just not very good at stopping myself from tweaking them knobbies. Pedals are just so damn fun.

[misterstomach]

Up til the past couple of years or so it seemed for a long time that there were just legions of fuzz pedals out there, but very little selection in terms of higher gain distortion. all the smaller builders were cranking out their owns takes on various fuzz circuits, but no one was doing high gain distortion. all the non-fuzz dirt was just low to medium gain overdrives as far as smaller builders went for the most part. it was really about 5 or 6 years ago when i really got away from amp gain and was getting into getting my dirt from pedals. at the time i had the hardest time finding a good distortion pedal. there were the boss options, the rat, the ocd has a good amount of gain but it's marketed as an od so i kind of overlooked it for a while. there was the crunch box, which i had for a while and eventually i got a surh riot. but almost all the small builders were lacking distortion. EQD had a bunch of mid gain od's that sound awesome, but no high gain. same with blackout. wampler had some higher gain amp in a box pedals, but i couldn't afford them. it was a tough time for distortion lovers, and it drove many into the loving arms of fuzz.

eventually we ended up with all these rat clones and variations that we have now. and there's the elements, the fuck and the mini. and hm2 clones are popping up everywhere it seems. things are getting better, but it's still nothing like the fuzz options.

[Harry_Manback]

so for a good 2 years i was a fuzz man…starting with a regular Big Muff and climaxing in my BAT Sarcophagus…and i still love it…but recently i added a Fat Boost and OCD to my board, and those two together give me great distortion tone…and now I'm struggling to choose one, even for the same song...

I ran the Fatboost -> OCD combo for quite a while. Great combination. I actually prefer stacking a Fatboost into just about all my dirt pedals (Elements, MF Drive, Pharaoh) to add a bit more wooliness.

For high gain I lean more toward distortion.

[Ancient Astronaught]

For me it differs depending on what I'm doing.

For my 7 strings in F fuzz loses most of the definition, its really hard to get crunch and clarity how I want it without flubbing out. So I use distortion set to kill with as much mids and low end as i can throw at it and it works great.

But for my six strings just a distortion isn't thick enough, yeah the rat on its own sounds good but its missing the heft and billowing tone I want so I use it more as a booster into either a meathead or a muff to thicken it up and keep the crunch.

Thinking about it though, i probably lean more on distortion than fuzz.

[benjuro]

Fuzz, man.

[t-rey]

Probably fuzz.

[chillerthanmost]

Most of my distortions are collecting dust. I play low to mid gain fuzz stacked with a light overdrive after it

[HeavyXIII]

so for a good 2 years i was a fuzz man…starting with a regular Big Muff and climaxing in my BAT Sarcophagus…and i still love it…but recently i added a Fat Boost and OCD to my board, and those two together give me great distortion tone…and now I'm struggling to choose one, even for the same song...

That sounds really familiar to me. All of my dirt stacking endeavors ended in unacceptable amounts of feedback, but I understand not being able to pick one sound or the other. It's tough; I'm glad my tastes are pretty simple. Sometimes you just need to take some choices away, whether you sell a few off, or put together 2 different boards.

That said, I hardly stack dirt anymore. Every dirt pedal I've ever owned (minus my Naga Clone) I've parted with for various reasons. I had a LBMP for a while, then replaced that with an ODB-3 (which I should have kept, considering it cost me $30) after I picked up a Bad Monkey overdrive for boosting purposes. I also traded my Geiger Counter, which was really cool in so many ways, but ultimately I couldn't justify keeping it, as I used it pretty sparingly. If I got another fuzz, I'd probably aim at something like a Velcrobot or ABsynth; maybe even a Civilian Geiger Counter, for the right price.

I'm a huge fan of loud, aggressive and "KERRANG". Sometimes that's a little cleaner than most dirt pedals can give me, and it's usually too loud for the neighbors. It's probably the magical sound of power tube distortion, but could be a lot of other things too I guess. If I want woolier, I can engage my Naga set to a dark boost or adjust my tone knob until I get the proper amount of hazy/fogginess in the sound. If that makes me a "distortion guy", then so be it. I LOVE looking at new fuzzes, they sound so fucking COOL; but ultimately I know that I already have what I want, more or less.

I guess it could kind of be like being married: looking at new "models" is ok, but why change anything if you really love what you have?