FZ-1 Fuzz-Tone

A sound that lives in one faulty part has a short life. Snoddy put it simply:

No one else used it to my knowledge. But then, it died.

People still asked for it. Snoddy had to tell them the amplifier had quit for good, “So I had to get busy and conjure some other way to make it happen.”

He did it with Revis Hobbs, a fellow engineer at WSM radio. The two of them built a small transistor circuit that made the sound on purpose, with no dying console required. Then Snoddy took it to Gibson and its president, Maurice H. Berlin. Snoddy didn’t play guitar, but Gibson had someone who did.

“I took the box, plugged it in, and Mr. Berlin said, ‘Hey, we want that.’”

Gibson put it out in 1962 under its Maestro brand as the FZ-1 Fuzz-Tone: a wedge-shaped box you worked with your foot, three germanium transistors inside, and two little 1.5-volt batteries to run them.

What it does is crude and brilliant. Your guitar’s signal is a smooth, rounded wave. The Fuzz-Tone clips the top and bottom off it until it’s nearly square, and a square wave sounds buzzy, bright, and loud. The germanium parts are touchy about temperature, but the effect follows how hard you play.

Gibson wasn’t selling it as a fuzz box, either. The patent application talks about guitars, banjos, and string basses producing tones “simulating other instruments such as trumpets, trombones and tubas.” The company even pressed a demonstration record, with a guitar doing its best brass section, a tuba, a cello, and an alto sax, all “with the touch of your toe.”

Put it on. It’s a little bit like hearing a car advertised as a faster horse.

The public met the Fuzz-Tone with a shrug. The first run didn’t do what Gibson hoped, and in 1963 and 1964 the shipments all but stopped.

So the pedal sat. The box that had saved a broken sound was, as a product, a disappointment, and that might have been the end of it.

In May 1965 the Rolling Stones were working on “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” first at Chess in Chicago and then two days later at RCA in Hollywood. Keith Richards had a riff in his head and a plan for it. He tells it himself:

I was imagining horns, trying to imitate their sound to put on the track later when we recorded. I’d already heard the riff in my head, the way Otis Redding did it later, thinking this is gonna be the horn line. But we didn’t have any horns, and I was only going to lay down a dub.

The fuzz was a placeholder. “It was down to one little foot pedal, the Gibson fuzz tone,” and it was only there to give a shape to what the horns were supposed to do. The horns were never recorded. The scratch part stayed, against Richards’s wishes, and the record came out in June. “At first I was mortified,” he said. Then it was the record of the summer of ’65, “so I’m not arguing.”

It went to No. 1 in America for four weeks, and every Maestro Fuzz-Tone sold out. That’s an original FZ-1 on the record, by the way. The revised FZ-1A, down to one battery, only arrived late in 1965.

Richards, for his part, says effects are “not my thing.” He reckons he’s only ever used foot pedals twice.

The patent came through in October 1965, in Snoddy’s and Hobbs’s names. By then the Fuzz-Tone had company. It was so hard to find in London that Arbiter built the Fuzz Face in 1966 as a simpler answer to it. The FZ-1B moved to silicon and a 9-volt battery in 1968. In 2022 Gibson brought the Maestro name back, with a Fuzz-Tone that has one circuit meant to sound like the original.

Richards said the fuzz tone “had never been heard before anywhere.” That’s how it felt from where he stood. It had been on sale since 1962, and on a country record since 1961.

It just took the same accident twice. A channel failing in Nashville, a dub left on a tape in 1965, and both times somebody heard it and decided to leave it in.