Tell me about the SSBS Mini/Fuck

[toothsome]

hey guys how about the buzz? pretty entire that fucking nasty shredded buzz saw tone. I've been renting an algal bloom from stomp club and i love the starve/crackle on it, but the waitlist for one seems crazy and im tempted to go for the buzz instead. have been eyeing mini and fuck for my overdrive for awhile.

[neonblack]

Buzz is one of my favorite fuzzes ever. Mini slamming into a Buzzz is a great sound. And it's so tweakable that there's no way you can't find a useable sound. It goes from full-range Hi Fi to splatty and broken.

[Pete]

Is the Buzzz similar to the Boss FZ-2 Hyper Fuzz?

[PeteeBee]

I could be wrong, often am, but I believe all the ssbs stuff is original designs.

When I'm playing at home I use my fuck on absolutely everything. There is just some setting that adds great little nuggets, no matter what I'm doing. Even if it's a "clean" pretty little diddy I'm working on, it'll get set like how I used to use my EP boost. Just add a little flavor and the crackle low or momentary. Most stuff I write is dirty and lofi type post-whatever and it makes everything a step better.
At jams I don't use it 100% of the time because I don't like to dial in tones every second, but it still sees lots of love.

[weed_killer]

*cough*excerpt from relevant interview I did last month with Brian about the fuck design and circuit ideas*cough*

EN: Once you got the TAFM going, was the Fuck Overdrive the next circuit you came up with?

BH: After the TAFM, I think I did a few small runs of other things. ‘The Year 2525/4545’ that I mentioned earlier, a super gated PWM fuzz with random modulation called the ‘Blargg-o-tron-o-tron’, and maybe something else that I can’t remember. I was thinking a lot about what I wanted my next production pedal to be and really wanted it to be something different, yet familiar. I was playing around with some different ways of starving the circuit of voltage. I tried envelope control and that’s when I started hearing sounds that got me really excited. I’ve been totally in love with William Basinski’s “The Disintegration Loops” album since first hearing it, especially the first piece, “Dlp 1.1”. Anyone that isn’t familiar with his stuff should be listening to it now. It’s just completely transcendent and magical with the loop slowly crumbling away, exposing new layers of noise, stuttering silence and timbral shifts. I kept tweaking the circuit until it became something more refined and usable. The familiar aspect was the fact that at it’s core it is a fairly simple drive pedal. The name was originally going to be a play on the Zvex ‘Super Hard-On’ boost, which has a knob labeled ‘Crackle, Okay’, since the main feature on this was a weird crackling breakup, but I felt like avoiding a cease-and-desist or something worse down the road. The name I settled on, the ‘Fuck Overdrive’, has some layers to it’s meaning and I feel like it’s great. I get some complaints every now and again but whatever, it’s just a word.

EN: As a guitarist/musician, I went through the usual trial-and-error process of searching for the 'right’ drive pedal, but when I found your effects, particularly the Fuck, it was akin to discovering an entirely new sub-medium that exists to communicate in. I’ve been able to use the fuck almost as a simulacrum tape recorder, getting that saturated, blown out sound to completely transform original signals or sounds into something entirely distinct. For you, were these kinds of applications and implications as important to the pedal as the basic functionality/hardware design?

BH: Yeah, of course. People always find new uses for things, especially when the actual effect is kind of vague. I don’t even really have a name that I connect with the sound on the ‘Fuck Overdrive’. Crackle? Fuckswitch? It’s labeled ‘Boom’ on the pedal but does it do that? I don’t know. Blown amp sound? Broken tape? I think it’s up to the individual to make it their own and that’s the best part of making something that someone is going to create with. In some way I get to be a part of that creative process and even in some cases help facilitate it. I remember when i first bought a Line6 ‘DL4’, which has a looping function. My friend and I had a long drive to take together. I took out the pedal and was reading the manual and it had batteries in it, so I connected it to the car stereo via the tape deck with one of those 1/8" jack-to-tape adapters and used a Minidisc mic with a ¼" adapter to go into the pedal. We made weird vocal loops for hours on that drive and it was so much fun and most likely not the scenario the developers at Line6 intended when they were designing the unit.

[casecandy]

I love that BH loves Basinski because hells yeah, it's magical.

Is the Buzzz similar to the Boss FZ-2 Hyper Fuzz?

No word on the Buzzz on my end, but I have a TAFM and that is literally the exact words I would use to describe it, "similar to the Boss FZ-2 Hyper Fuzz." It has that same supersaturated tone where you can just barely touch the strings and you get fat sustain that refuses to fade away.

Honestly I've been playing dissonant chords with both pedals on at the same time, like, really simple stuff, like Drop-D tuning, third fret power chord (F, I suppose), only with the fifth fret on the d string instead, that sort of super simple dissonant power chord, and it just goes on forever, decaying. Even a little reverb and it's a complete wall.And then I stepped on my PS-5, octave down, and my it glitched so bad (good) my wife asked, "I know you like weird loud pedals, but... did you really need a bagpipes simulator?"



The TAFM is way more versatile though, because you can get a clean blend going in mixed with a minimal amount of fuzz and honestly it's like this attacky sort of Gin Blossoms, Tom Petty country rock sound, or like a Beatlesy tone, even.

It's my first SSBS pedal and I immediately Facebooked BH and told him I'm a convert. Based on it I'd buy any one of his other pedals.

[Strange Tales]

The FZ-2 is based off the Superfuzz in some way, right? I know the Buzzzz is like the Superfuzz on steroids.

[casecandy]

The FZ-2 is based off the Superfuzz in some way, right? I know the Buzzzz is like the Superfuzz on steroids.

The FZ-2 is based on the Super Fuzz, yes.

Anything Shin-Ei/Jaxx/Univox is in the same family, loud, buzzy, sputtery things. They're similar to the Maestro fuzzes, too, the Fuzz-Tone and the Brassmaster.

From my limited experience with SSBS so far, I get that vibe in a huge way, too.

[toothsome]

the GAS overcame my free will and i kopped a mini and a buzz yesterday

[casecandy]

Nice!

[neonblack]

the GAS overcame my free will and i kopped a mini and a buzz yesterday

I'll take the Buzzz if you don't like it

[Inconuucl]

Oh, in dumb. I didn't know that the Fuck's crackle was a starve. And I asked Brian if he could add a starve knob to a Fuck.

Maybe to starve the other stages.

[JamesSGBrown]

Is the Mini the more versatile of the two? The Fuck looks amazing- but I have a Space that can do glitchy stuff...I'm thinking the Mini might cove rmore ground in terms of gain?

[kbit]

The mini will give you a more tonal flexibility and consistent lofi sounds, but the crackle on the fuck really isn't like anything else I've tried, and playing with the envelope/your attack strength is really fun. It doesn't really sound glitchy the way a delay/verb might.

[goroth]

Kbit tells the truth.