1965 and earlier Fuzz pedals?

[edkoppel]

I know this has been discussed in here, but what fuzzes can you think of that came out before the boom (1966/67)?

Did anyone clone the FZ-1 before 1965/66? Or was it really just a fuzzy wasteland from '62 until the Tone Bender was invented?

[Nick]

Yes!

Pepe Rush claimed that he designed the Pep Box after hearing (or being shown) an American recording of fuzz. We don't know exactly when he began building pedals, but I was able to corroborate the story that he built & sold them himself initially, before later teaming up with WEM (after speaking to an old geezer that told me about how he acquired his). Because WEM were already involved by August 1965 (when they were reported promoting it at the BMII trade fair), for Rush to have been building them privately at first, it's very likely that the Pep Box was a pre-Satisfaction fuzz.

Same thing supposedly goes for the GP Electronics Harmonic Generator — the guy who designed it claimed that the idea came after hearing fuzz on an American recording. He thought that they started making them in 1964, and the owner of one gave me a pretty strong testimony about having it in 1965. It's probably not based off the FZ-1 though.

The earliest Vox Distortion Boosters were based off the FZ-1 (with a similar two-transistor arrangement to the Pep Boxes), and they came about in 1965 as well. Not sure whether these predated 'Satisfaction'. It's a tight matter of a month or two, because the Distortion Booster was also demonstrated at the August trade fair, but BI reported a delay in production, and as a result we don't really know when the DB was actually available.

Roger Mayer says he made fuzz boxes as early as 1964. There's also an ad that Mayer ran in Melody Maker, in 1966, which claimed that the units had already been in production for two years prior to that.


I can't think of any commercial pre-1965 American pedals though, but I'm sure they were plenty...

[edkoppel]

Awesome! Thanks Nick
In reference to the Vox Distortion Booster, I remember reading once that the circuit was based off a schematic from this GE Transistor Manual that came out in 1960.
But obviously that doesn't mean the effects were nearly that early.

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[Nick]

The factory schematic for the (American) Thomas Organ model is basically a Fuzz Face, and they could have got that idea from anywhere (including from the silicon-transistor Jennings version, which was basically the same thing). In fact, Dick Denney was reported to have traveled to the States to inspect the American versions of the plugin series in late 1965, so the American model being based off the British DB seems somewhat more likely IMO. The Fuzz Face/MK1.5/silicon Distortion Booster is a textbook amplifier circuit though, and particularly in the case of the Vox DB, it's difficult to pin down the exact origins.

That GE book is freely available online, and I didn't actually see the exact circuit arrangement of any of the DB versions (let alone matching parts values etc) inside. Having said that, it's almost 1AM, I'm uneducated, and also lazy, and so I didn't look too closely

In my previous post I was referring to the early (and seemingly short-lived) germanium-transistor Distortion Booster, which was built in the UK, and has more in common with the FZ-1. I'd be surprised if whoever designed it was looking through American textbooks...

[edkoppel]

Ok sweet!
Yeah i just half remembered that when I was reading your response.
The Harmonic Generator is a crazy one! Would be amazing to find one of those.