Fuzz is basically extreme distortion.

A fuzz pedal heavily distorts the guitar signal, creating a tone characterized by its sustain, compression, and harmonic richness. Fuzz clips the guitar signal in a way that produces a unique square waveform which results in the characteristic fuzzy sound that we know!

Its first use is widely attributed to guitarist Grady Martin in 1961 on Marty Robbins’ hit song Don’t Worry. And like all great things in rock’n’roll, it was an accident: a fault in a mixing console that propelled engineer Glenn Snoddy to recreate the extreme, square-wave distortion ‘mistake’ in a stand-alone device using three germanium transistors.

The design was sold to Gibson who marketed it as the Maestro FZ-1, finding eventual fame – and a whole new revolution in guitar tones – on Satisfaction by The Rolling Stones in 1965.

That seminal design spawned the Fuzz Faces, Tone Benders and Muffs that we love to this day, with germanium transistors remaining at the heart of the most sought-after-models. Germanium transistors have always been highly inconsistent and incredibly temperature sensitive, however, so silicon transistors became an early alternative.

The sound differences are much debated, suffice to say a certain Mr Hendrix used fuzz pedals with both germanium and silicon transistors in the late 1960s as the latter became available.

We’ve put together a selection of videos below to give you a bit more fuzz-formation about these awesome pedals. Go forth and fuzzify!