Fuzz Factory

He wanted something ordinary. “A regular fuzz,” he said, “something with its own tone but like a Fuzz Face-type thing.” It sounded like mush. So he put a small booster on the front, and then things got strange:

The pedal just went haywire: it started squealing and making all kinds of weird noises and I couldn’t get it to settle down.

He couldn’t find the right fixed parts, so he swapped them for knobs and went hunting. He wrote down the settings he liked. One of them he named “Ripping Velcro.” Then he went to bed sometime in the morning.

When he woke up in the afternoon, it sounded just as good. The plan was to let his friends pick a favorite sound and then fix the parts in place. His friends said leave all the knobs in. There was also a switch for positive or negative ground, and positive ground made it even less stable, so he turned that into a knob too. Now there were five.

He wanted a case shaped like a foot, with a knob in each toe. He couldn’t afford the casting. While he was painting a plain box instead, the name came to him: “it’s a factory of fuzz, a way of manufacturing your own tone – something unique to yourself.”

He took it to Westgor. As Vex tells it, the answer was blunt: “You’re crazy. Nobody’s gonna want five knobs. They’re not gonna be able to figure out what to do.”

Vex thought the opposite. “You adjust it to the spot where you feel like you’ve created your own sound.”

The knobs are Volume, Gate, Comp, Drive and Stab, and even Vex’s manual says, “please don’t hold me to it.” Drive does roughly what Fuzz does on a Fuzz Face. Gate and Comp change how the transistors are biased, and bias them “wrong” and the signal sputters, cuts out, or starts to whistle at you. Stab sets the voltage feeding the transistors. The manual’s advice is to leave it all the way up, “unless you like your fuzz soft and squishy.” Put it first in your chain, with no buffer ahead of it, and it talks back to everything your guitar does.

Vex couldn’t afford silk-screening, so for the first year or so his girlfriend hand-painted them.

The break came from a road trip. Vex got his pedals into a store called Rudy’s, and PJ Harvey’s guitarist Joe Gore walked in, bought an Octane, a Fuzz Factory and a Super Hard-On, and wrote about them in Guitar Player. That was 1996 or 1997, Vex thinks, and after that the Fuzz Factory took off.

Meanwhile one was already in the right hands. Vex brought serial number 005 to Dan Wilson’s birthday party in 1996. Wilson, of Semisonic, put it on “Completely Pleased,” “All Worked Out” and “California.” “It was a new sound for me, so I used it as much as I could.”

That included a song about last call. “The lead guitar track featured my brand-new Z.Vex Fuzz Factory,” Wilson said of “Closing Time.” The producer, Nick Launay, wasn’t convinced. “Nick Launay complained it sounded ‘irritating’ and I knew what he meant – but I was so excited about it! So he rose to the challenge and made it sound huge.”

Around 1999 or 2000, Matt Bellamy of Muse walked into a pedal shop in Tokyo. He doesn’t remember the name. “I was looking at all the weird ones, and that one sounded amazing. I had to have it. I literally used it that night in the show.” At the end of every song he was down on the floor making noises with it, and he decided: “I need this on the guitar.”

His first custom Manson, an aluminum guitar with a DeLorean-style finish, had a Fuzz Factory and an MXR Phase 90 built into it. From about 2001 it was his main guitar. On Origin of Symmetry you hear the Fuzz Factory in the squealing at the very start of “Plug In Baby” and in the glitchy stabs in the verses of “New Born.” Bellamy’s own guitar company says he found that intro and the riff while playing the Fuzz Factory in the studio. Vex knew the second he heard it. “I knew instantly that’s what it was!”

Nels Cline of Wilco keeps one among the few pedals he uses “in every kind of music,” and brought it to the sessions for The Whole Love. He pairs it with a Whammy set two octaves down. His description is the best one anybody has given: “really strange and intense and uncontrollable.”

Westgor was wrong about the five knobs. Each of those players found a different spot on them, and each one sounds like nobody else.