Bring the fuzz: guide to achieving rifftacular fuzz tones

Electro Harmonix Nano Big Muff Pi

If someone asked me what my favourite audio effect was, my answer would most probably be this; I love the thick, saturated sound of a good old fuzz pedal. For this entry, I wanted to have a look at how to use some parallel processing techniques especially related to EQ to get the most out of a fuzz tone and make those riffs roar with sustain. For this I used the ‘Fuzz Machine’ pedal on Logic’s pedalboard plug-in and my Chinese-made Fender Strat with double humbucking pickups. After recording a riff with this setup, I loaded a basic clean amp sim to act as the foundation for the fuzz effect to sit on and duplicated the original riff into four separate tracks with two of them medium-panned and the other two hard-panned to give width to the sound. The idea behind this was to use the two medium-panned tracks to get a bass-heavy, smooth underlying fuzz tone, then use the two hard-panned tracks to add a touch of high-end snarl and presence to the overall tone.

I went through a three-stage process to achieve this:

1. Mic selection/placement – I found that one can drastically alter their sound by simply moving the mic position and trying out different mic models on the amp sim plug-in. For example, I used a condenser 87 style mic positioned towards the edge and a bit back from the digital cab for the smooth fuzz tone and contrasted this by using a dynamic 609 style mic in a more central position close to the cab to bring out the high end more for the snarly tone.

2. Channel EQ – Simple here, basically I set up the smooth tone tracks so that they were boosted slightly in the low/low-mid frequencies and cut at about 500Hz so as not to lose clarity and again at around 3kHz up. Then for the snarly tone tracks I just accentuated slightly the higher frequencies (approx. 1kHz up) to achieve high end bite.

3. EQ in pedal chain – I also added in a graphic EQ pedal just after the fuzz pedal in the pedalboard signal chain. The Pro Audio Files posted a few tips to try when recording fuzz pedals on their website, one of which was to use an EQ pedal in congruence with fuzz. I found that this was useful as it gives you an extra layer of control over the tone and allows for subtle changes to be made at the source. I configured the settings on the EQ pedal to reflect what sounded sonically right to me as I listened to the riff.

This is the process I went through to achieve the guitar tone heard on the "Fuzz Riffage" video from Oct 11. Try it out, add your own variations and it would be awesome to hear how y'all get on.

Peace out my fellow fuzzlords.