Dwarfcraft Devices Winds Down With Special Eau Claire Thunders

April 20, 2020 · 5 sources

Dwarfcraft Devices announced it was winding down, and marked the end of the company with special editions of the Eau Claire Thunder, the fuzz pedal that put the Wisconsin builder on the map in the early aughts¹. The pedal takes its name from the bad weather of the company's hometown, Eau Claire, Wisconsin².

The Eau Claire Thunder is a fuzz and distortion pedal housed in a die-cast enclosure with sturdy metal construction and heavy duty foot switches³. Get Offset described it as "a mythic fuzz box by our Midwestern friends at Dwarfcraft Devices"⁴, and traced its origin to a complaint about a classic circuit: "the Eau Claire Thunder was born because our Old Pal Aen had a beef with the mid scoop of traditional muff style fuzzes"⁴. Delicious Audio's reviewer found it covered a wide range of tones, from "the blunted, smokey kind of Sabbath style fog to the much more modern"³.

The special run followed the earlier Gold Standard Eau Claire Thunder, a fuzz pedal that Gearnews described as "a warm-sounding boutique dirt/fuzz box"⁵. Delicious Audio called that version "a Muff-style fuzz box with three footswitches and some pretty unusual controls"¹.

The wind-down closed the book on Dwarfcraft Devices, whose signature fuzz remained its best-known creation through the final special editions⁴¹.