McGregor Pedals McGregor Classic Fuzz

The McGregor Classic Fuzz is a fuzz pedal from McGregor Pedals built on a silicon Fuzz Face-style circuit, though Premier Guitar's reviewer noted it "is not precisely a silicon Fuzz Face clone"¹. Its heart is a pair of BC107B top hat transistors, the two-transistor arrangement behind the classic 1960s fuzzes¹². In a later Premier Guitar roundup of fuzz flavors, the same pedal was described as "Beautifully capturing the sound, feel, and organic responsiveness of classic 1960s 2-transistor fuzzes"².

What it does

The Classic Fuzz aims at the beastly, touch-sensitive character silicon Fuzz Faces are known for, and Premier Guitar's review found "ample reminders about the many ways silicon Fuzz Faces can be beastly, sensit[ive]" in its response¹. What sets it apart from a true silicon Fuzz Face (SFF) is a low-pass filter "bass" control, a knob true SFFs lack, which the reviewer said "widens its vocabulary extensively"¹.

The bass control changes the pedal's character considerably. Premier Guitar's reviewer found that at roughly the 60-percent mark of the bass control's range, the Classic Fuzz sounded roughly equivalent to a BC108 Fuzz Face clone, but more dimensional, with tone variations spanning what the review called garage-punk snot and triangle-Big Muff thickness¹. In the fuzz roundup, Premier Guitar summed it up as "rich, moody, highly interactive ... and more than a little wild"².

For players comparing fuzzes, the Classic Fuzz sits in the two-transistor, Fuzz Face-derived camp rather than the op-amp or four-transistor designs behind many distortion pedals and overdrive pedals, and its added bass control gives it a wider tonal range than a stock Fuzz Face layout¹.

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