This article has been much requested - following on from my similar takes on the 7 Key Big Muff varieties and 9 Key Tone Bender varieties. I’ve sort of covered this a little bit before courtesy of my 6 Potent Fuzz Face Pairings feature and also my piece on Key Fuzz Transistors, while this offers a more comprehensive and expansive overview.

Everyone knows the story about how Ivor Arbiter of Sound City / Drum City fame sort of adapted the MKI.V Tone Bender format into a mic-stand-base ...

It is fairly evident that my favourite pedal genre is Fuzz - seeing as that of all the pedals I added to the collection this year - 80 of those were Fuzz varieties.

This particular selection consists of 31 pedals across different sizes and sub-genres. And of those 31, I personally own 22 of them. All the remainder are of course on my wishlist, these are :

• DanDrive Secret Machine (I own Secret Weapon edition)
• Dusky Electronics Augustus Octave Fuzz
• Fjord Fuzz Fenris Super-Fuzz

This is probably the most anticipated of my 12 Degrees roundups - and is a touch more complex and different to the other 2 in the series. Within each category here there can be a huge difference in character and output - for instance with Fuzz Faces going from quite mild to rather searing Meathead and Regulus VIII levels of aggression. So the gradual step up in gain per category doesn’t apply here. And because of circuit variations and differences in components and construction, each and every ...

So this is one of most significant works in a while, and carries on the legacy of two of my most popular all-time articles on the 12 Degrees of Saturation - the Original that evolved in the early months of 2017, and the follow-up which materialised in September of 2018.

I obviously deal with a lot of reader inquiries pretty much on a daily basis, and one of the more popular lines of inquiry has been about overdrives. And while Josh Scott attests to the fact that there are only 5 core ...

This article was inspired by a series of dialogues I had with my now pal Bruno - about DanDrive Secret and Acid Fuzz Zoink Machine fuzzes initially - but then branched out into a more general conversation about Zonk Machine Fuzzes.

The John Hornby Skewes Zonk Machine was in fact a very closely related MKI Tone Bender style fuzz which emerged very shortly after the appearance of the original Colorsound MKI Tone Bender. In fact the circuits are almost identical - 3 x all germanium ...

You should know by now that I’m a big fan of DanDrive Pedal - per my September 2019 overview of the brand. And of course I dearly love my Austin Pride (Germanium/Silicon Switching Texas Square Face Fuzz) and Secret Weapon (Zonk Fuzz) pedals from that overview.

To be honest I was a tad miffed when Dan introduced a third John Hornby Skewes Zonk variant - as I had only just recently then acquired the Secret Weapon edition. Dan’s original take on the JHS Zonk was the Germanium ...

I’m possibly writing this just a touch prematurely as at the point of writing - one of the pictured pedals hasn’t turned up quite yet, and it will be touch and go if gets released out of customs before the end of the year. That pedal being Sinvertek’s new N5+ Drive - featuring no less than 7 beautifully milled aluminium knobs along with 5 toggle-switches - and all within a compact enclosure format - but more of that later.

This year has mostly sort of gone to plan - but there are really too...

Like many others I’m guessing, my first exposure to DanDrive Pedals was courtesy of Joey Landreth’s brief Secret Weapon Fuzz appearance on a relatively recent That Pedal Show Episode 

I confess that I was not fully aware of Dan and his super high quality brand of Fuzz Pedals until that very moment - which is rare for such a Fuzz fan as me.

DanDrive Pedal Solution has actually only been established for a couple of years now - with the earliest official record being the first DanDrive ...

This article is somewhat in response to the fairly recent arrival of my long quested for Spaceman Gemini IV (originally chasing the III), and the imminent arrival of my DanDrive Austin Pride Fuzz. In fact when I was working on my last but one article on Tone Benders I was in two minds as to whether to include Paul Trombetta’s Bone Machine GTX - as I’m not 100% clear on what its circuit provenance is and exactly which fuzz family it is supposed to belong to - in the end I determined ...