Fire Red Fuzz

[Goran]

Hi
This is my first post on this forum, I didn´t know it excisted but glad I found out. I have been very active on the Boss forum since it started.
Just got a Fire Red Fuzz and I´m very pleased with the sound of it, and I see the pedal visually as a piece of art.
I want to know as much as possible of this pedal, I have searched the forum and not found much.
I mean the philosofy and thought behind it etc etc

[Donner]

Welcome !!
To me the fire red fuzz is a perfect blurring of the line between useful fuzz and distortion - I think most would know exactly what to do with this pedal in about 60 seconds .... its almost too easy to find a useful sound but t here are a whole range of those type of tones to explore in there and it works with most amps too .... what have you found useful about it?

[BJF]

Hi Goran,

and welcome to the forum

The MP Fire Red Fuzz.........started out as an experiment in wether sound lies in vintage components or filtering and then led to optimizing in terms of preformance.

It started like this a well known Swedish guitarist mr 'Nord' showed me his collection of fuzzes and we had a long discussion on uses and what had been used over the years and availability and just anything related to fuzzpedals and as the discussion drifetd over to Big Muffs that I have repaired and restored more than I care to remember those also brought on many memories such as how you'd buy a new one if one broke down back in the old days- if you were mr Nord- and collect for spareparts if you were me anyway. While those Big Muffs looked the same on the outside there were many revisions and quite in the way of getting more impressive results outof each control allthough Big Muffs have through the years sounded similar there were indeed some that sounded a bit more interesting,useful or whatever....some of those I have also repaired and restored and even reboxed at request so I am familiar. with several variations and even so having seen and played hundreds of Big Muffs I have never before or after played one like that.
Anyway mr Nord asked me if I'd repair his favourite Big Muff of all he had one he had bought in NYC and of a type known as triangular or something like that due to the layout of the knobs and it had been repaired so many times that the pertinax pcb hardly had any traces left but almost all lines were repaired as some of the heavy components on the pcb had vibrated the fragile traces and now 25-30 years after it was made it was ready for the trashbin but it was a great sounding unit that needed restoration.

Having a closer look at the circuit board to arrange all components so as to prevent further damage and as mr Nord also asked what made this unit so special to his collection of Big Muffs I could later tell him that my thoughts were that the biggest impact of sound would be the tuning of the tonecontrol that was different than anyother Big Muff I had seen and I could only draw the conclusion that this must have been one very early bird.
Actual electronics changed day by day in those days and only the product name and profile would be important in marketing.

I built one proto Violin fuzz to prove this point. However this is more a fun story than anythingelse and Big Muffs as mention in this text refer to the Electro Harmonix product.


When MP pedals needed a fuzz I thought of this experiment.


There would lie no other purpose than to use the fame of Electro Harmonix company to mention this in marketing which is why it was never done and besides if you place the MP Fire Red Fuzz side by side with currently made EH Big Muffs you can not make them to sound alike and yes I have tried and that alone would make many disappointed.

Have fun
BJ

[Goran]

Thanks a lot for the answer Bjorn!
When I read about the Big Muff connection I thought yes, there are signs of Big Muff in the Fire Red Fuzz. But I think FRF sounds much, much better than any Big Muff I´ve tested. I would call FRF a refined Big Muff perhaps, but there are sounds in it that no Muff I have tried has had, so it´s far away from a clone.