Martian Tarantula

First generation vintage fuzz tones

Angry sounding fuzz, but fairly well-behaved; nice authoritative voice.

Based on the earliest fuzz pedal design (the TBMk1), that is hard to find, expensive, and typically all sound different from one another; they have an interestingly bright sustaining sound on the high strings, and surprisingly good chord articulation for something so grindy and fuzzy.

I designed this using silicon transistors for temperature sensitivity and consistency from unit to unit. Oh also they're cheaper and easier to source. But anyway, I did tune this thing to sound like the old ones that use very old-school germanium transistors. I got it to stay nicely biased and polite, but then I backed up that process ever so slightly so that it is capable of sounding just a little bit broken--makes it much more interesting and fun!

The original circuit's "Attack" (also called "Filter" in the Marshall Supa Fuzz) was a dumb bias control that didn't actually lower the gain but made the signal cut out when turned down low. I changed it completely, made it useful (but still not a gain control), and renamed it "OVERLOAD" instead.