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Muff Blaster is a massive distortion pedal capable of exploring the fat guitar tones of the most famous Muff-oriented pedals that have made history, the guitar tones which have never gone out of fashion since 1970, finding ample space for the most varied musical genres: from Blues to Heavy Metal, from Jazz to Stoner.
Short story for an inspiration
In 1968, Mike Matthews, an IBM computer technician founded the well-known company Electro-Harmonix. In 1969 Matthews himself gives life to a preamplifier called LPB-1 from which he gives birth to a prototype called Muff Fuzz, in this device there was nothing but 2 LPB-1 in cascade, this unit has been perfected within a few months with the precious help of Jimi Hendrix (indispensable in the realization of this prototype) adding some components in the 2 stages, concluding with the addition of a sustain control (distortion) and a tone control.
Towards the middle of the year 1970 the Big Muff is put on the market enjoying great success: Carlos Santana ordered one by mail directly from Mike Matthews in 1971, Pink Floyd guitarist, David Gilmour, in the following years created a real own trademark for his sound, making it fundamental. Thin Lizzy, Kiss, Frank Zappa just to name a few, have contributed to the diffusion of the Big Muff unit on a large scale; in the following two decades this distortion device was also chosen by bands such as The Smashing Pumpkins, NOFX, White Stripes and many others, including Mudhoney who even wanted to pay homage to this cult device by naming one of their songs “Superfuzz Big Muff”.
Fuzz and distortion…
Distortion and fuzz have a common denominator: they’re designed to generate distortion, the way this is achieved con’t be considered to change depending on the name given to the unit, only the design of the circuit can determine it. The most famous fuzz-boxes were developed in the 60s and usually designed to be connected as the first effect in the chain to interface properly with the high impedance of the guitar pickups, resulting (often but not always) in a surprising clean tone by rolling off the guitar volume knob. The term “distortion” is however much more generic, in common thinking, without speaking about purely technical talks, it is considered more modern.
The Muff Blaster, as well as the Big Muff series enjoy the benefit of both worlds: first of all there is no need to connect it as the first pedal in the chain, its high input impedance allows the guitarist to connect it into any pedalboard in any position without impedance troubles; at high levels of distortion, the 4-stage circuitry allows the player to achieve modern tones without sacrificing dynamics.
Features of Muff Blaster
The Big Muff series, since 1970 till today has been full of submodels and reviews, the circuitry was changed very often and this process has led its users to prefer one version rather than others. The 3 modes toggle switch makes the Muff Blaster a real inspiration to 3 of the most used and most successful models of Electro-Harmonix, all enclosed in a single pedal: Ram’s Head Big Muff, Civil War Big Muff and Green Russian Big Muff.
In addition we can find a control called “Gate” which recreates a very particular sound degradation effect, widely used in the 60s but brought back to light in early 2000 with the Bit-Crusher effect which simulates the sounds of vintage videogames. The “Gate” control doesn’t work at all if the relative potentiometer is positioned at maximum, when “gate” knob start to decrease it’s possible to obtain strange and bizarre sounds ranging: from trumpet/trombone simulator to the lo-fi sounds of the consoles/coin-up and video games of the years 80s.