Another super busy month for me - particularly towards the end - with numerous large scale articles out this week. That also coincided with my busiest week of the year for my other day job. Meaning that I was up until 4-5 in the morning every day - just to keep up with my commitments.

I was already somewhat shattered and burned out before I even got to this super busy period - and it’s a relief that all that work has now been completed on schedule.

I’m especially proud of my work on the Bucket ...

My close association with Thorpy started back in late September of 2018 - at the now defunct Olympia UK Guitar Show. He was the first pedal maker I reached out to, and the first I connected with.

Since then ThorpyFX Pedals have become my 3rd most populous selection after Boss and Drunk Beaver. Those 3 brands alone contribute over 200 pedals to my reference collection!

The fact that I’m now at 31 ThorpyFX Pedals is a major milestone - and features every mainline MKII pedal Thorpy has made. ...

This has turned out to be something of a Thorpy month! - following on from the recent Manson Supermassive Black Fuzz and 3 Thorpy acquisitions this month - indeed the Supermassive is also engineered by Thorpy!

I thought I should do a quick retrospective of pedals and projects that Thorpy has been involved in.

I selected my favourite pedal from those 4 brands (some singular options!) :

• Redbeard Effects : Bearded Vulture Direct Drive with Octave
• Victory Amps : V1 The Jack Guthrie

What we have here is an incredibly potent fuzz - consisting of 3 x OpAmps, 3 x Silicon Transistors, and 2 x Blue LEDs - so the core fuzz flavour is already immense and richly textured - very much ’Supermassive’ in its output. And you then have an impressively powerful tone stack essentially - consisting of an expansive Filter [Warp] (350Hz > 5kHz) used in tandem with a wide-ranging ’Q’ bandwidth control [Dimension]. So essentially a sort of semi-parametric EQ - where you set your chosen ...

For those that already own the Germanium Have Blue and Tacit Blue Pedals (like me) - the Redacted initially would seem to obsolete those - by providing versions of those 2 circuits in a single compact enclosure.

While those are not the same really - and contain quite different transistors onboard - the Have Blue and Tacit Blue have somewhat softer and smoother 2N-type Germanium Transistors. While the Redacted contains somewhat more aggressive - fierce even - mil-spec Transistors.

...

When I first encountered the Supermassive Black Fuzz - I thought the Footswitches + LED arrangement looked very familiar! I found out later that indeed this was another Thorpy Collaboration - where Adrian designed the circuit, and the custom enclosure for Manson - while the artwork and labels are their own!

There was a fateful meeting at London’s RAK Studios - where the key proponents all met up for the first time!

It’s well known that Matt Bellamy favours the Zvex Fuzz Factory Circuit ...

In fact that Spring Reverb algorithm appears on 3 different Fjord Fuzz pedals in order - the MIME II, Dovre and this 4-controls Fjær - each of those have different preamps onboard - so they each have differences in output nuances. Where for me the Fjær sounds particularly lush!

As mentioned - the Fjær benefits from 4 controls - Dry, Wet, Size and Tone. I’ve mostly been deploying that with the Dry slider in the middle, Wet is all the way up, Size is @ Noon, and Tone is @ Noon. It can sound ...

August turned out a little bit different than expected. Not so many releases - as expected - but really busy regardless - with a number of Marquee Events and Articles throughout the month. With the king of the crop being the Extended Capacitor Primer - to which I’ve just added a further section on Capacitor Lifespan. Obviously I hit 15,000 followers on Instagram - which is a significant achievement - a really killer month all-round with some big articles - meaning I’m a little bit burned out ...

For this particular article it probably makes sense to first check out my second visual below - which explains most of the technicalities of this pedals - which has a very unusual control topology to match its rarified construction.

You can see from the Transistors references that the first two are for the Percolator circuit - Q1 & Q2, we then have the Q3 Buffer that boosts into the Factory Fuzz circuit to overcome the typical impedance issues for said 2nd Fuzz circuit. And then the Factory...