Cleveland Music Co's Midgeapocalypse Vintage Fuzz is a fantastic take on the Shin-ei Companion Fuzz

Cleveland Music Co’s Ricky Sheaves reached out to me just the other day and asked me to check out his new Midgeapocalypse Vintage Fuzz - which is a quite superb take on the Shin-ei FY-2 Companion Fuzz with maximum versatility and impact via 4 really clever controls.

It turns out that Cleveland Music is actually a proper family business - where Ricky is the chief pedal engineer, his partner Selena runs the back office, and their daughter Casey designs the Graphics, A kind of similar vibe to Flattley pedals in the UK!

The Midgeapocalypse is one of those highly interactive fuzzes - which responds incredibly well to your guitar Volume and Tone knobs, and whose own 4 knobs give you the widest possible palette of textures and tones. As with many of the great fuzzes there is a high degree of interactivity between the 4 knobs - and so you will find yourself adjusting several in tandem - as raising one typically means you need to adjust / lower one or two of the others.

The control topology here is actually quite distinct - such that I need to fully break it down to explain the finer nuances. The below demo of course brilliantly illustrates just how versatile and finely calibrated this fuzz is.

Controls - Volume (Output), Texture (High Frequency Harmonics), Boost (Midrange), Splat (Low End).

• VOLUME : Adds plenty of output to remedy the famously-low volume of the original circuit
• TEXTURE : Brings more high-frequency harmonic content into your tone
• BOOST : Allows you to dial in just the right amount of midrange, making the available tones more fluid, raw, and distinctive than they already are
• SPLAT : How much bass content you allow into the effect, which can vary your sound from a single buzzing gnat, to a blooming mushroom cloud of zombie midges at more extreme settings - pre-gain bass on many fuzzes is where so much of the breakup is generated

I really love what I’ve seen and heard of this fuzz - and it goes straight in onto the wishlist / acquisition list. I actually really love the artwork too - it’s evidently Casey’s best looking pedal to date! I feel that almost comic book look evident here could really work well across more of the pedals - and perhaps should become a more significant feature of the range. After all the Cleveland skyline used on every pedal is kind of a visual metaphor for Gotham or Metropolis in this context and style!

That said - there’s also a few more of the Sheaves family pedals that I’d love to get to grips with - the Bleepcakes Overfuzz (Percolator), Flats Distortion (evolved Rat), and Woollybear Fuzz (TB derived Fuzz) in particular. All available right now for a very reasonable $149 each - via the Cleveland Music Co Webstore. It would be handy if there was a single overview store page - but each of the Pedals is currently listed separately!

I feel the below evidence is all you need to be convinced of the Midgeapocalypse’s prowess. Ricky seems to be a somewhat under the radar Fuzz genius at the moment - I’m pretty sure he and his family will get the recognition though soon enough!