Roight.  This one came as a request from my bud Ray “Wisconsin Ray” Walker from Arizona.  Dude said he’s in a new garage band and needs a fuzz pedal, so I reached all the way back to the beginning of fuzz and pulled out this doozie.  Back in the early 60’s there were effects for guitar and organ but they were usually focused on making delay or reverb sounds.  The very first devices for making intentional distortion were fuzz boxes, and this is the very first one of them, the Maestro FZ-1.  This is THE one heard on the Rolling Stones “Satisfaction”, and countless other early american and british garage and psych rock and roll tracks.  It pre-dates the fuzz face and the tone bender, and in some ways it shows it.  It doesnt have the refined, meatier sounds of some of the later fuzzers.  Instead the sound is quite bright and buzzy, but in doing so it stays cool and classic sounding.  You wanted garage….this is garage! 

This version was made using my old standby, the “weird-old-stock” Soviet MП38A germanium transistor.  Controls are Volume and Attack and they should pretty much both be cranked at all times.

**post title courtesy of J Pereira!!!**