Fuzz Face

Open one up and there’s almost nothing inside: two transistors, three capacitors, two pots, and a footswitch that takes the whole thing out of your signal when it’s off. Volume and Fuzz. That’s the pedal.

Roger Mayer, who built effects for Jimi Hendrix, knew exactly how bare that was:

It was such a basic circuit that most people in electronics would never have used it because it was fraught with many, many problems.

The early ones ran on germanium transistors, and germanium is fussy. Matched pairs were hard to get, so the units varied. Heat changes how they behave, and some studios put early Fuzz Faces in the fridge before recording with them. Denis Cornell, an engineer at Arbiter in the 1960s, later described auditioning the transistors for how they sounded.

The reward for all that trouble is the way it plays. A germanium Fuzz Face distorts a little lopsidedly, which makes the fuzz come on more progressively. It also has a low input impedance, so it listens hard to your guitar’s pickup. Roll the guitar’s volume down and the fuzz cleans up into something closer to overdrive. The knob on your guitar is the third control, and it may be the one that matters most.

Hendrix is the Fuzz Face’s most famous fan, and it starts with his second single. Work on “Purple Haze” began on 11 January 1967 at De Lane Lea in London. Hendrix added his vocals and guitar between 3 and 8 February at Olympic, turned on the fuzz, and cut it. It was out in Britain on 17 March.

The solo is where people get it wrong. That high, octave-up shriek is the Octavia, Roger Mayer’s unit, on its first outing. The Fuzz Face is coupled with it, but the octave is the Octavia’s doing. Mayer remembers going back to Olympic after a gig:

He picked up his Telecaster, and that’s when we did the overdub for ‘Purple Haze’ and ‘Fire,’ using the Octavia.

A Telecaster, then, not a Strat. And whatever was inside Hendrix’s Fuzz Face in early 1967, it wasn’t silicon. That came later.

In April 1968 it was reported that Arbiter had merged with Dallas, and the boxes that had said “Arbiter England” started saying “Dallas-Arbiter England.” Around the same time, germanium gave way to silicon. Exactly when depends on who you ask: 1968, or somewhere around late 1968 and early 1969.

Silicon Fuzz Faces sound brighter and harsher, and they could pick up radio interference. The paint wandered too: red, black, hammered silver, assorted blues and greys. Nobody agrees on which came first.

Hendrix played the silicon versions, and he took many copies on tour, because they were so unreliable. Across New Year’s Eve 1969 and New Year’s Day 1970, Band of Gypsys played the Fillmore East in New York. Billy Cox, the band’s bassist, said Hendrix was using a new combination of effects for the first time: a Uni-Vibe, an Octavia, a Fuzz Face, and a wah.

“Machine Gun,” from the third show, is that rig pouring out of a Stratocaster. The album came out on 25 March 1970.

David Gilmour had a germanium Fuzz Face first, then a silicon Dallas-Arbiter from early 1971. In October that year, when Pink Floyd played the amphitheatre at Pompeii, it was the Black Strat, a 1969 Stratocaster, into a silicon Fuzz Face. And lying next to his amps, you can see a spare.

Eric Johnson still had a ’60s Dallas-Arbiter Fuzz Face on his board in 2018, next to a vintage TS-808 Tube Screamer, feeding a Two-Rock head. The list of other users runs long: Duane Allman, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Pete Townshend, George Harrison, Paul McCartney, Kevin Parker.

Arbiter stopped making the original in 1975. Crest Audio of New Jersey reissued it, Dunlop bought the rights in 1993 and has made it ever since, and Arbiter had its own go in the late 1990s, with Cornell putting AC128 transistors in it.

But the best picture of the pedal is still Hendrix with a pile of them. He was known to buy ten Fuzz Faces at once and play every one, looking for the best one or two.

Same round box, same smile, ten times over. The sound was in one or two of them, and the only way to find out which was to plug in and listen.