HOT FUZZ

10 recent-vintage fuzz pedals - in pretty much every price range that'll help you nail everything from George Harrison's buzz-saw "What Is Life" tone to stoner metal bliss à la Electric Wizard and Fu Manchu

- AMIT SHARMA

EVERY GUITARIST NEEDS at least one fuzz pedal. Even if you’re the kind of player who tends to live on the clean channel and disregard distorted sounds, you can still benefit from owning one — whether to clean up via your guitar volume for a treble-focused “glassy” tone or to unlock ear pleasing octaves as a special effect. Anyone who has been heavily influenced by classic artists like Jimi Hendrix and the Stooges, late-Eighties greats like Mudhoney and Smashing Pumpkins or modern masters such as St. Vincent and Chelsea Wolfe, however, will probably have considered investing in several of these boxes across the years — and with good reason.

As legend has it, the invention of the fuzz pedal dates back to engineer Glenn Snoddy’s work on the sessions for Marty Robbins’ “Don’t Worry” in 1960. A faulty channel on the mixing desk at Quonset Hut Studio in Nashville gave Grady Martin’s Danelectro baritone an unexpected tone, one that Snoddy later reverse-engineered and sold to Gibson, who in turn made history by releasing the Maestro FZ-1 Fuzz-Tone in 1962. Prior to this, guitarists like Link Wray had been overloading their amplifiers and poking holes through the speakers in hope of achieving similar distorted noises, damaging expensive equipment with no real guarantees in terms of the fruits of their efforts.