Mid-Fi Electronics Peace Gun Fuzz

The Mid-Fi Electronics Peace Gun Fuzz is an intermodulating fuzz with a sweepable resonant filter, in the same family as the maker's Demo Tape Fuzz and Another/An-other (Fuzz Version). One builder on the Tagboard Effects circuit-sharing blog described its character this way: "It has the sound of a fuzz with a lot of gain but feels like you're playing with a clean tone which makes for a very dynamic sound."¹

What the Peace Gun does

As an intermodulating fuzz, the Peace Gun pairs fuzz distortion with a resonant filter that can be swept across the frequency range. Builder Dave, who spent time with the circuit, put it like this: "Its kind of like a cocked wah and fuzz together, but a very grainy fuzz, and it never gets ear piercing like some resonant filters can."¹

Not every builder found it worked as a standalone drive tone. BuzzTones described it as "a low gain fuzz which has a peak at high frequency and cuts some low-end. It works better with a cranked amp or a d[irt pedal]" than as a sole clean amp gain and frequency response. MAndrews agreed in part: "I can't get anything but a thin uninteresting sound out of it with my amp."¹ In practice, that points to pairing it with a cranked amp or another dirt pedal, such as an overdrive or distortion pedal, rather than expecting it to carry a clean platform on its own.

Controls and circuit

The original pedal has four knobs, per the maker's website as quoted on Tagboard Effects.¹

Builders working from the stripboard layout noted a few quirks worth knowing:

• The filter and resonance pots appear to work backwards: the highest fizz is heard when the Frequency pot is turned counterclockwise all the way.¹
• The circuit uses the MPSA13 transistor, and its pinout is 180 degrees of the layout image, so orientation matters when building.¹
• The power supply filter, or smoothing, cap is optional. The layout's designer left it that way because such caps "can change the character of the fuzz and tame things down," so including or omitting it is a voicing choice.¹

One builder suggested a mod: adding an input gain pot, because changing the input gain changes the sound drastically. The same builder confirmed the circuit "sounds amazing" once built.¹

Versions and what builders said

On the question of separate filter controls, one builder found that "Two pots give way more possible settings," while a dual pot "will result in tigher control that equals in more focused sound."¹ That is a trade-off between flexibility and focus for anyone building the circuit with five knobs instead of four.

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