The Deadman Fuzz is a hybrid silicon and germanium fuzz, weighted low and responsive enough to follow your picking hand. One knob takes it from a dark, warm clean to a thick, sustaining fuzz with the long, slow decay the pedal is named for.
Built for blues, psych, desert and stoner rock, and for anything that needs powerfull fuzz with punch behind it.
Named after the Jarmusch film and voiced for its soundtrack: long sustain with torn edges, notes that hold and decay slowly, an empty landscape that goes on ringing long after you stop playing.
A four-transistor circuit in the Big Muff family, rebuilt around two germanium stages we measure and match by hand from vintage stock, in an arrangement of our own. The character comes from them.
Most fuzzes of this type flatten out your dynamics and barely respond to the guitar’s volume. This one follows your hands: pick softer or roll the guitar back, and it cleans up to a warm, clear tone
For the Deadman Fuzz, we created our custom hybrid silicon and germanium schematic. Two silicon transistors handle amplification and attack. Two germanium transistors handle saturation, clipping and the shaping of the spectrum. Each material does what it is best at, and that is the whole point of the hybrid. That split is also what keeps it stable: the silicon carries the gain, and the germanium only colors what passes through it, so temperature has far less of the sound to act on.
The result is a mellow, colored clean tone, a creamy overdrive, and a rich, textured fuzz. That is what sets the Deadman Fuzz apart from similar circuits.
The special arrangement of the germanium stages gives a saturation you will not find in a standard circuit: gritty, with a rounded and soft clipping edge, a big bottom end, a pronounced lower midrange and the top noticeably pulled back. This is not a Big Muff frequency curve.
The character also keeps changing as the Fuzz knob comes up, and that is deliberate. At the minimum, dark and barely dirty. Low and mid gain, a warm overdrive weighted to the lower mids. Around the middle, a dense, balanced drive and fuzz with long sustain. At the maximum, brighter and sharper, with real bite on top.
Four pedals along one sweep.
Low-Cut is what balances the pedal’s many voices against each other. It trims the lows and leaves the high mids alone. Clockwise, the low end pulls back and the top gently opens up. Counterclockwise, bass and gain come in together while the highs roll off softly.
This is where circuits of this family usually lose the argument: the classic tone stack scoops out the midrange, which is why so many of these pedals disappear the moment a band starts playing. Our Low-Cut works the other way. It is a compensation control, not a tone-shaping one, so every position is usable. The pedal stays clear at all of them, never muddy and never harsh.
“Deadman Fuzz is able to stand alongside some of the best fuzzes we’ve heard.”
“More than just another Muff clone, the Deadman could be a future classic.”
“It is done well in this case, making for an extremely impressive fuzz which is thrillingly gnarly while punchy enough to get through a mix intact.”
“Desolate torn-speaker tones.”
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