The EAE 0xEAE Fuzz is the product of a collaboration between Massachusetts’ Electronic Audio Experiment and a new collective dedicated to circuitry design called Obstructures. The builders present it as a “dangerous gain device.”
Reminiscent of the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey but actually inspired by the brutalist architecture of the mid-1900, this is an op-amp fuzz that can deliver over +80dB of gain and feed a lot of output to your amp for extra saturation.
The two more peculiar controls here are Texture, which adds an octave up at the input of the fuzz circuit, and Weight, which affects the fuzz’s attack and thickness via a sweepable high-pass filter and it’s very interactive with the Texture and Gain controls.
More traditional fuzz tones can be found with the Gain knob below 50%, but for the adventurous and the destruction-inclined, this knob can deliver up to 80dB of gain!
Have a listen to it in the videos below.
EAE 0xEAE Fuzz, Builder’s Notes
The 0xEAE Fuzz is our latest collaboration with the design collective Obstructures and is the most dangerous gain device in our lineup to date.
The imposing neo-brutalist geometry houses the auditory equivalent of an angle grinder. There is no subtlety or transparency to be found here. This belligerent and deceptively versatile op amp fuzz circuit is capable of over +80dB of gain with a massive volume output. The Weight control adjusts a lightly resonant pre-gain high pass filter at the input, for tones ranging from tight, ripped-speaker grind to bass-rich aluminum slag. The Texture control blends in a full-wave rectified analog signal, producing an octave up that gets fed into the fuzz input. At higher settings it creates piercing intermodulation products and sub-bass artifacts with a synthesizer-like attack.
Finally, we included our robust bypass switching and voltage-protected power supply infrastructure—making the 0xEAE Fuzz a rugged tool for many years of fuzzed-out rancor.
Controls
Master: Output volume level. Slide right to get loud. Very, very loud.
Texture: Slide right to blend in an analog octave up at the input of the fuzz circuit. Low settings add broken harmonics, high settings add a strong 2nd harmonic with harsh overtones and sub-bass artifacts.
Gain: Primary gain stage. Slide right to add gain up to an irresponsible +80dB. For conventional sounds, keep below halfway. This control is not for the meek. Expect, embrace, and channel the noise.
Weight: Changes the cutoff of a high pass filter at the input to alter the attack and thickness of the fuzz. Slide left for a tight attack, slide right for crushing bass frequencies. Highly interactive with the Texture and Gain controls.
Footswitch: Effect activator.
