j gets 500$ and buys a fuzz face?

[mw]

has anyone seen this article, i think it was in guitarworld circa 1994 or so… they gave j 500$ to go and shop at some guitar shops. he gets to the first store and buys a fuzzface for the full 500$. am i making this up? does anyone have a copy of this article?

[RayNeades]

"mw" wrote:

has anyone seen this article, i think it was in guitarworld circa 1994 or so… they gave j 500$ to go and shop at some guitar shops. he gets to the first store and buys a fuzzface for the full 500$. am i making this up? does anyone have a copy of this article?

That’s true. I remember that pedal.

[ammaringnyc]

Yeah I remember that it was one of the very early once. They are expensive. Basically he agreed to do the article of they went gear shopping. I think he went to rogue music in NYC.

[darren]

I have that issue of Guitar World, they take him to Rogue Music in Manhattan and give J $500 to spend on whatever he wants, the only catch being that J has to answer their questions as he shops !

The fuzz face he bought has it’s original price of $39.95 written on the bottom of it…

[mw]

"darren" wrote:

I have that issue of Guitar World, they take him to Rogue Music in Manhattan and give J $500 to spend on whatever he wants, the only catch being that J has to answer their questions as he shops !

The fuzz face he bought has it’s original price of $39.95 written on the bottom of it…

any chance you could scan it?

[stanner]

umm…which issue is it?

[darren]

sorry I don’t have a scanner……..

it’s from October 1994

[Mattman]

Fun Fact:

The original Face Faces were made using germanium transistors (two in the circuit), which are very inconsistant in their operational ranges from one unit to the next (unlike current silicon transistors, which are very consistant).

So, the deal was that if you just got lucky enough that both transistors in your Fuzz Face happen to operate within certain range, then you’d have one awesome distortion effect on your hands. Since the chances of having unmatched transistors was pretty high, a lot of Fuzz Faces sounded like crap. This can be compensated for to a certain degree with small adjustments to the circuit, if the transistors are at least pretty close to matching eachother, but Dallas Arbiter (the company the originally sold the Fuzz Face before Duncan bought the rights) either wasn’t aware of this back then, or was too busy trying to pump out as many units as they could, and therefor couldn’t bothered… Probably a little bit of both.

Warning: Highly Technical Stuff!

Here’s a much more technical article of how the Fuzz Face works, for anyone with at least some electronics knowledge:

The Technology of the Fuzz Face

[jeffreyerg]

If I can remember correctly, the cover story is about the Who.

[Author]

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