Hot Gear Friday – The Big Muff

What was that term we used to use to refer to nebbishy guys who’d suddenly get all ten-foot-tall-and-armor-plated when they’d get a couple of Sex On The Beaches down the hatch?

Oh, yeah – “Liquid Courage”; the phenomenon whereby someone with no aptitude at something becomes an expert, maven or badass after marinading their brain in ethanol for a bit.  It has analogues in the worlds of philosophy, sex, music and so on (Liquid Intellect, Confidence and Talent, respectively).

The kicker is, “Liquid” attributes aren’t all bad.  How many of the world’s great works of art have been created by people who were more bombed than Atomizer on a Saturday morning at Byerly’s?  How much of the world’s great music was created by people who washed their great ideas down a chaser?  Not just booze, of course; drugs and mental illness have both helped artists, thinkers, creators of all stripes to unlock their inner genius.  Or at least swing for the fence.
Of course, anything the human mind and body can do on ethanol, it can do with technology.  Photoshop has given almost anyone the ability to alter photographs in a way that used to take LSD or spyrochaetal paresis.  The reversible turntable allowed people who can’t play music to…play music.

And in the days before the Line Six computer-based modeling preamp, there were two ways to sound like Jimi Hendrix or Jimi Page: great drugs, or the Big Muff.

The Muff was a “fuzz box”; it introduced distortion into the signal chain between the guitar and the amp, making an amp at normal indoor-level volume sound like it was being overdriving until the speaker cones were red-hot. The three knobs controlled the tone, volume and…er, flatulency of the “fuzz” effect, while the big stomp-switch allowed you to turn the effect on and off with your foot.

It didn’t put out the really nice, high-quality harmonic and overdrive distortion that you got from cranking a Marshall stack to 11.  It was more the kind of farty-sounding “fuzz” you heard on songs like “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction”, George Harrison’s “What Is Love”, and a zillion other sixties and seventies songs. Which wasn’t a bad thing in its own right; psychedelic, gassy fuzz has its place.

But here was the cool part; if you turned the “fuzz” off, but cranked the output volume on the unit anyway, it would make your clean amp (me: a 1960-ish Fender Deluxe) sound just a tad dirty; the difference between sounding like George Benson and George Thorogood.  It’d add that little edge of drive that’d put just a sweet little tinge of distortion around the edge of you “clean” tone.

In other words, there were the Two Stages of Big Muff:

  1. the Psychedelic Hummingbird phase – where you wallow in fuzzy pseudodistorition because it makes your notes bleed together enough to make you sound really cooo, maaaan, and…
  2. The Preamp phase – when you realize that the Muff sounds best when it’s “off”, yet still “on”.

Mine got stolen in high school, by the way.  I know who did it.  And I know where you live, and I’m just biding my time.

One thought on “Hot Gear Friday – The Big Muff

  1. Aye, the Pi. A classic for the time – I liked it for its non-subtle characteristics where it made a small, cheap amp sound like quite a bit more that it was. Kind of like an Ibanez Tube Screamer, which I liked in the same way. They were good for what they were at the time but you just couldn’t get all Metallica with them. Which makes sense, since Metallica wasn’t using a thin Kalamazoo guitar through a tiny Crate amp. But these things let ya kind of calibrate your ears.
    Really these pedals were gear for guys who started playing rock before they got jobs and could afford the real deal – which is totally valid. Not everyone can just go buy a Marshall half-stack, especially at 15.
    I think pedals (pre-Line 6) peaked with the Boss Metal Zone. Those were the Pi taken to their logical conclusion, if you tweaked ’em right. You really could get all Megadeth or whatever with those, no matter what you were playing through.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.