The Muffketball Diaries

So, I've been looking into them, listening, learning from extensive documentation (http://www.bigmuffpage.com/), learning about version and circuit differences, and ultimately what makes them sound different from each other and other species of fuzz pedals. That is another digression, since there is still skepticism as to who created the first fuzz circuit... an American or a Brit, and therefore where they all came from and regarding who has been influenced by whom.

I will attempt to condense the history into an as readable as possible explanation however including details of interesting phenomena as necessary and also while reconciling my own personal escapade in the present...

Being a practical person of modest means I set about to find the best sound without compromising my ear nor my billfold. The classic pedals are large and bulky, but sturdy, and have non-standard power jacks. Can "they" fit the real sound in a smaller box? I think so. There is a manufacturer in Kansas City, MO that has another product I like, a faithful recreation of the Univibe pedal they call the Unicorn, which sounds great. The Univibe was originally a Leslie speaker simulator that was cool in its own right, and famously used in Hendrix's "Machine Gun" along with many more tracks into the present day, and certainly another worthy sidebar full of interesting music lore...

So the pedal maker in Missouri, JHS, made a Big Muff Pi that has five different circuit variations in one convenient unit with a little tiny knob to select which one you want to play, and their own homebrew circuit variation as well. They call it the Muffuletta. Clever! I bought one. Boom, problem solved.

In case you were wondering, I'm coming back to the chocolate.

Sustain. That's what the Big Muff is made for. That sound when a guitar player hits one note and it just carries on and rings out forever in a glorious fabric of sweet harmonic distortion until it morphs into pure feedback... but somehow this feedback is still carrying some sense of musicality to it... it's intoxicating. Think of Phish's "The Divided Sky"
That's sustain.

All of this looks hideous on paper, by the way. Guitar amplification is the most unscientific hair splitting bullshit that you would never want me to go into, hence my prior comment about a 12AU7 tube and a certain orifice. You don't want distortion. You don't want feedback. Any school of audio technology will tell you that... and then the electric guitar came along. These people still insist on using 1940s technology but goddamnit no one has come up with anything else that sounds as cool, or full of life, or organic.

It's an incredible paradox... organic sounding electronics, or even the fact that people are using high tech research into finding out why people's ears don't like science-y produced audio devices. The Leslie speaker is probable one of the single coolest things I've ever heard, and if you love music and you've never been in a small room or bar where someone is playing something through a Leslie speaker cabinet, don't stop until you hear it for yourself in person. Nothing compares to hearing the sound being literally flung around a room with a mechanical rotating device. It completely changed the way that I think about music and audio and is also the inspiration for the aforementioned Univibe effects pedal as well.

King Buzzo. High prince of the fuzzo..

So I built my own. It only cost my $30, the time it took to assemble, and then several hours of finding out where the short is that was making it not work. 




I got it on a whim even. The Amazon listing was such Chinese garbage that it didn't even attempt to claim that it was a Big Muff and instead just a generic fuzz box. It sat in my to do pile for a month easy. But after taking my time and testing it dozens of ways, it worked. Not only did it work, but it sounded good. It sounded huge. 



You guys may remember that I counted the diodes. Well, probably not, but that's how I realized this kit was at least perhaps somewhere in the Muff family tree, as far as how it sounds, and worth checking out. 

The significant difference of all the other Big Muffs and the Smashing Pumpkins pedal is the use of operational amplifiers, op amps for short, instead of the other circuit design which uses transistors. And get this - version 5, the op amp Muff, has a switch on the back that turns off the tone knob and removes the mid scoop. So I start looking for a real one.

I'm pretty sure this song does not use a Big Muff in the instrumentation. Interesting.

I've owned several versions but never at the right time for me to hold on to one. For example, I used to buy pedals on Craigslist and then sell on eBay or Reverb because I noticed there are a lot of people who don't want to deal with the hassle of online buyers and shipping. My first introduction, my first real Muff was Russian. I had a fucking misprint too! It was ultra rare, now that I realize it, and I sold it many years ago. So after the manufacturer EHX went bankrupt in 1983, they stopped making them, but of course guitar playing experienced a resurgence in the 90s so they re-incorporated and turned to mothballed factories in post-Soviet Russia to fill the demand. This had some notable consequences of which the most pronounced are bad paint jobs.



One year, they decided to flip the circuit boards over because of production changes and the mounting of jacks to the boards differently, this resulted in the reversal of the location of the input and ouput jacks. So on very scant few perhaps, in fact the only one I've ever seen was the one I owned, they printed over the already painted labels. I had one that was labeled OINPUT AND INPUT. I'm kicking myself just thinking about it. For all I know, it was one in a billion. Imagine the worker who saw that on the line that day. Did they even notice it? Good enough for government work. These boxes were actual commie electronics enclosures, painted Soviet army green, and loaded with surplus military capacitors and resistors being sold back in the states. People hated the Russian ones for their dodgy jacks and power plugs until they realized they sound different. Many still work around this, but I'm a practical guy.

Here's a note about circuit variation. Some examples from the same period do not sound the same and I can attest to this first hand. I had two Green Russian Muffs and one of them sounded noticeable better. Sometimes different components were used based on what was available on the day of production. This is a business after all. Other times the actual electrical values of these physical components can drift over time.

All things are built to a tolerance. For example, a resistor might go into a guitar pedal that is rated 100 Ohms with a tolerance of plus or minus 5%. Over time, this may drift out of that tolerance, and after a few decades it might read 93 ohms or even 107. These things can take on an audible difference in the way the pedal responds to the input of an instrument.

I sold my handmade muff and searched low and high for an op amp Muff. One day, I'm watching the new listings drop in on the live feed and there's a nice unit, version 5, late 70s, unmolested, op amps, sounds great no scratchy sounds when you turn the knobs, and it has the original cardboard box. No way, I think to myself. I mull it over for a while. The seller is new, no feedback, no other transactions, and he's in Japan. Should I buy it? I sold my other black Russian Muff copy pedal and some other pedals I wasn't using to free up some funds and I went ahead and got it. Now the waiting game begins.