Sometimes affordable, simple, great sounding stompboxes give us exactly what we need today, but their one-trick-ponyness fails to keep us entertained for very long.
That’s why exploring a distortion pedal priced just short of $500 like the hand built Celestial Effects’ Cancer Wah The Fuzz can actually make sense. Another plus is that a pedal like this gives you a very wide palette of tones produced by effectd that are designed to work with each other at the source, therefore sparing you from spending time researching pedals from different manufacturers that integrate well with each other.
The Wah The Fuzz hosts four effects under one enclosure, in this order: a Fixed Wah, an Octave Fuzz, a Muscle Fuzz and a Tube Overdrive.
The Fixed Wah is an effect dear to Frank Zappa and consisting in turning the wah on and leaving it at a certain position without moving the rocker. On the front panel, only the WAH TONE control is available but internally, there are trim pot adjustments for “Q”, GAIN, INPUT IMPEDANCE and MIDS CUT. There is also a jumper block selection available to select one of four center frequencies for the WAH TONE control – this thing is DEEP!
Next in the signal path is an analog Octave Fuzz based on the Octavia design. Controls are FUZZ, VOLUME and a switch to turn the octave feature ON and OFF.
The Muscle Fuzz is a variation of the Ram’s Head design, and also features a clean gain stage after the Tone section to compensate for the signal loss. Controls are FUZZ, VOLUME and TONE and a switch to select Tone circuit.
Last in the chain is a real Tube Overdrive section, featuring a JJ Tesla 12AX7 tube which can be easily swapped for the experimenters out there! A stripped down, non-clipping version of the Taurus circuit feeds the tube, with GAIN, VOLUME and EDGE controls.
The main strength of this pedal – besides how good it sounds – is its versatility, if you don’t believe us check out the demo below – more videos here.
