I have been buying and messing around with old pedals for over twenty years. On this page you’ll find most of the vintage pedals I’ve amassed since I started making my own.
Some are significant in fuzz history, like the Maestro Fuzztone and the Supa Fuzz, others are oddities or things that caught my eye when the price was right.
Most are germanium fuzzes with a slant towards the 1960s, which is where my fuzzy heart is. They are the kinds of pedals that Good Fuzzy Sounds aims to emulate in spirit.
Also, I just like anything that says ‘Fuzz Box’ on it!
Dearmond Tremolo Control
These were first produced around 1947 and started to be used with guitar by Bo Diddley and Pops Staples in the 1950s. This is an early (pre serial number) example. A classic sound!
Maestro Fuzztone FZ-1
Probably not the first fuzz pedal ever, but the first commercially produced one. Initially used on a few country hits in the early 1960s, it sold poorly until Keith Richards blew the world open with Satisfaction in 1965. This is the archetype, and still one of the best.
Maestro Fuzz FZ-1 (2)
This was a counterfeit FZ-1 and sounded bad. I rebuilt it with the correct transistors and tweaked it for more gain, getting it more towards Tone Bender territory.
Maestro Fuzz FZ-1A
I have several of these, this is the first one I got, from the first post-Satisfaction run in 1965. Most of them have a mod or two. This is a very adaptable circuit, small changes have a big effect. It was these tweaks that made me realise I could make pedals people would buy.
Marshall Supa Fuzz
I bought this for £6 in the mid-1980s, not knowing what it was at all. The finish had been stripped so I painted it myself. A friend said he thought it was made by Marshall so I posted a pic on my first website and Stu Castledine confirmed it was branded Marshall but was effectively a Sola Sound Mk2 Tone Bender. I used it in my band Six Inch Killaz in the 1990s, and it was my only pedal for a long time
Orpheum Fuzz
I built two versions of this before I found an original, but the original sounds much better. It was probably built around 1967/8 somewhere in New Jersey. It’s based on the germanium version of the Mosrite Fuzzrite, but oddly I had two of those and didn’t really like either one. Fuzz can be mercurial!
Mica Tone Fuzz
Likely made by the same people responsible for the Orpheum, but with with different transistors and other mysterious differences. I tried making my own enclosures in this style but they were hard to get right.
Amtron Guitar Fuzz Box
An op-amp based fuzz produced in kit form in Italy in the 1970s. Interesting construction and colour combo.
Shin Ei Fuzzie
These were produced in Japan for different US department stores. Despite the look, it’s not a Fuzz Face style circuit, but has it’s own splatty 1960s thing going. I tried to trace it once, but it’s on a really tiny PCB and I couldn’t really work it out.
1970s DIY Fuzz
What a great look! A home-made oddity, using half of an obscure dual LM308 op-amp. I haven’t seen this circuit anywhere else, it could be a one-off. I added the footswitch, it had a toggle on the front like a Rangemaster-style amp-top box.
D&M Distorto
This sounds a lot like the FZ-1 and is also powered by 2 AA batteries, but the components have been painted over and seem to have been arranged in a deliberately confusing way. From Santa Ana, California in 1966, this is number 019, so I guess there’s not many of these around. The guitarist of Steppenwolf had one.
Effekt-1
I love these clunky Soviet-era Russian pedals. This one, from 1979, needed a few mods to be usable. It now has a nice big fuzz and vibrato and a vowelly wah sound.
Earth Sounds Research Graphic Fuzz
ESR sounds like a California cult or a Buckminster Fuller-inspired back-to-the-land enterprise, but no, they made some amps and this really weird but charming 1970s fuzz. Love the graphics too! Plus I have the original box and instructions.
Jen Tone Bender
Cheap garden-variety 1970s Italian fuzz that’s basically the same as the Vox Tone Bender. I swapped out one of the transistors for an OC75 to bring it a bit closer to full 1966 raspiness.
Kazan Booster
Made in 1977 in the the USSR parallel universe, this is a great germanium fuzz with five or six transistors and lots of texture, but it needed a small mod to get to a reasonable volume. I had to get of these after I seeing it described as having a “rooty Velvet Underground sound.”
Anta Fuzz
Another product of the Soviet planned economy, this looks like the Kazan but is a much sharper silicon fuzz, very in-your-face, which I like in a fuzz.
Kimbara FY-2
These average-sounding but cool-looking silicon fuzzes are very common. They were produced by Shin-Ei in Japan under many names for several years in the 1970s. Kimbara appears to have been a UK importer’s brand name, from 1975. They sound ok in stock form but I knew there were various methods for making them sound better/louder, so I picked up a cheap one. With the mid-scoop filter bypassed it sounds great!