{"id":2490,"date":"2008-05-02T08:42:52","date_gmt":"2008-05-02T13:42:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=2490"},"modified":"2008-05-02T01:30:35","modified_gmt":"2008-05-02T06:30:35","slug":"hot-gear-friday-the-big-muff","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=2490","title":{"rendered":"Hot Gear Friday – The Big Muff"},"content":{"rendered":"

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?<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 It has analogues in the worlds of philosophy, sex, music and so on (Liquid Intellect, Confidence and Talent, respectively).<\/p>\n

The kicker is, “Liquid” attributes aren’t all bad.\u00a0 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?\u00a0 How much of the world’s great music was created by people who washed their great ideas down a chaser?\u00a0 Not just booze, of course; drugs and mental illness have both helped artists, thinkers, creators of all stripes to unlock their inner genius.\u00a0 Or at least swing for the fence.
\nOf course, anything the human mind and body can do on ethanol, it can do with technology.\u00a0 Photoshop has given almost anyone the ability to alter photographs in a way that used to take LSD or spyrochaetal paresis.\u00a0 The reversible turntable allowed people who can’t play music to…play music.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

It didn’t put out the really nice, high-quality harmonic and overdrive distortion that you got from cranking a Marshall stack to 11.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

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 <\/em>dirty; the difference between sounding like George Benson and George Thorogood.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

In other words, there were the Two Stages of Big Muff:<\/p>\n

    \n
  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,<\/em> and…<\/li>\n
  2. The Preamp phase – when you realize that the Muff sounds best when it’s “off”, yet still “on”.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Mine got stolen in high school, by the way.\u00a0 I know who did it.\u00a0 And I know where you live, and I’m just biding my time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2490","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hot-gear-friday"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2490","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2490"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2490\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2490"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2490"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2490"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}