Guardians of the analog
Well-known member
Fuzz, I like it, but just like adolescent girls, it's hard to live with. I've struggled for years to find fuzz that wouldn't sound terrible in my rig and be riddled with placement and impedance issues. Well there is no perfect pedal but this is perfect for my needs and go figure it would be the short lived and hard to find Boss FZ-3 that would tickle my fancy and become my go to fuzz of choice and get a fuzz pedal back on my board.
The fz-3 is like the Boss engineers took a fuzz face and a tonebender and put some George Michael on and made a shameful love child. It's a flame thrower. Like anything boss in the 90s, it's over engineered but it solves the issues of impedance and placement. Does it clean up up like a germ FF? No, but the cleanup is still pretty good considering the amount of volume and gain on tap. The tone knob is a helpful addition to tame any harshness or help bring the edge back. I was really surprised with this one since because boss is not known for fuzz (fz-5
) and the fz-2 is like the golden child, this was a nice vintage style fuzz that should be getting more love. Did I mention it doesn't care about wah and buffer placement?
The build was simple, I used j201 smd jfets I got from @Robert and the rest is all generic simple to get modern parts. For the enclosure I went with a winked silver tayda box with UV printing. To go with the argent theme (silver) I found the dopest silver surfer image I could find and rocked that. Thanks to @SYLV9ST9R for exploring new ways to work text into vectors and getting the argent text incorporated into the surfboard. For the demo I used my strat with treble bleed and low output vintage wind single coils on the bridge into my blackface set clean. Volume, tone and gain set just shy of 1 o'clock. I highly recommend this circuit.
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