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KNIFE OD & FUZZ
GERMANIUM LIMITED
€265
BEST OF VINTAGE OVERDRIVES, FUZZ FACE, TONE BENDER
The Knife OD is a vintage overdrive and fuzz built around BJT transistor clipping, with no clipping diodes. Inspired by iconic fuzz pedals like the Fuzz Face and early Tone Bender, we’ve captured their essence and enhanced usability across the full control range by optimizing key circuit elements.
The Germanium ‘Cooper Antic’ variation is built on a combined silicon and germanium approach, with a reworking and tweaking of the original silicon Knife OD&Fuzz circuit for an authentic soft, creamy tone, as well as greater versatility in tone shaping and the Shape Bias control.
Explore a wide palette of clean and creamy vintage tones, from a clean germanium preamp and warm boosts to soft saturation, smooth overdrive, and powerful fuzz.
From Rumble to Foxy, Ace to Bloom, and beyond!
NEW EXPERIMENTS. NEW TONE.
Some experiments with transistors, biasing, and the components of the original Knife OD&Fuzz circuit led us to new and great-sounding solutions.
“Replacing with a germanium transistor adds warmth and roundness. Changing the feedback loop compensates for the low gain of the vintage transistor and reshapes the input bias. Completely reworking the biasing achieves more compression with lower gain. Switching to germanium enables reduction of the high-frequency smoothing filters. A refined frequency response: tight and compressed lows, bright but rounded highs, and an accentuated lower midrange.”
The Cooper Antic is our second ideal tuning and adaptation of germanium and silicon fuzzes, vintage preamps, and overdrives. It has a larger grain, rounder and softer clipping with slightly more compressed gain, a creamy frequency response, and an alternative tone-shaping approach.
FUZZ’S ATTACK & ATT SWITCH
The Attack knob controls the pre-clipping gain, adjusting the first transistor’s gain for precise control over clipping and saturation. The pedal delivers a wide range of tones, from warm, clean sounds and balanced vintage overdrive with ripped speaker textures to powerful fuzz, offering more versatility than traditional passive or vintage-style circuits.
The ATT switch reduces the gain by half, allowing you to achieve both low- and high-gain fuzz tones and giving you flexibility to boost or soften the overdrive and fuzz.
The Cooper Antic version delivers smoother clipping with more compression, articulated large grain, a little accentuated midrange with overall brighter sound, and a germanium preamp‑like tone at low and medium gain.
TONAL SHAPE CONTROL
The Knife OD features a Shape knob for precise control over the frequency response, allowing you to sculpt the tonal foundation before the clipping stage. The knob also affects the bias, adding or removing more gain and compression.
In the far-left position, the tone sharpens and brightens, slightly emphasizing upper-mids and reducing lows, and the bias also makes the sound slightly more open. In the far-right position, the tone becomes rounder, with enhanced lows and low-mids, and sounds slightly more overdriven as a result of a stronger bias.
In the Cooper Antic version, the Shape control feels more pronounced due to the circuit reconfiguration and can control the bias of the germanium transistor for stable operation.
TEARING SPEAKERS, REIMAGINED
The Knife OD offers immense headroom, pushing your amp even at low gain with a clean boost. At medium gain, it provides rich saturation and a low-gain vintage overdrive. Higher-medium gain produces a musical, asymmetrical fuzzy overdrive, while maximum gain unleashes a thick, powerful fuzz with long sustain and compression.
Regardless of the gain setting, the Knife OD responds beautifully to your guitar’s volume knob, delivering crystal-clear tones when rolled back, like a classic Fuzz Face.
The Cooper Antic version can work as a vintage germanium preamp with varied tonal color, or as a source of soft, compressed, creamy saturation and old‑school rounded clipping with a brighter tone.