Pete Cornish NG-3

The Pete Cornish NG-3 is a hand-built fuzz pedal from British maker Pete Cornish, a builder with a reputation for no-frills, solidly engineered effects¹. Where most fuzzes aim for warmth or sustain, the NG-3 was, in the maker's own words, "Specifically designed to simulate 'Imminent Amp Death'"². Aion FX puts the design intent in plainer terms: it emulates "the sound of a blown power tube or output transformer right before it all goes up in smoke"³. Pete Cornish's product page frames its intensity with a wink: "In the range of generally available fuzz boxes covering a scale from 1 through 10, this one goes to 15!"²

Released in 2010 as the successor to the NG-2 and the N.G. Fuzz⁴, the NG-3 is a custom-built unit with several separate stages, so the player can tune it to their own degree of amp failure².

What it does to your sound

The NG-3's character comes from its third stage, which simulates a tube amp that has been over or under biased, or has suffered serious tube or output transformer failure¹. The SUSTAIN control adjusts the signal level driving that stage, and Pete Cornish labels its range in amp-failure terms: from "Tired Output Tubes" to "Melted Tubes and Shorted Output Transformer"².

Aion FX's testing found the Bias knob is the heart of the pedal's range⁴:

• Bias fully up: fairly traditional fuzz sounds⁴
• Bias dialed down: the tone turns into what Aion FX calls a glitchy mess, with gating, sag, feedback, velcro and instability⁴

That external Bias knob is the NG-3's defining difference from the NG-2. On the NG-2 the bias control was internal, and Aion FX's account of the lineage records that it was moved to the front panel at Lou Reed's request: "Lou asked if this could be made external so that he could adjust it to find other possibilities"⁷.

The controls

The BIAS settings map directly onto amplifier bias classes, which is what makes the "failing amp" framing literal rather than figurative²:

• Class A (fully clockwise): the stage conducts over the whole input cycle and produces the lowest distortion.
• Class B (about 12 o'clock): the stage amplifies 50% of the input signal, creating more distortion than Class A.
• Class C (fully counterclockwise): the stage conducts less than 50% of the signal, so only the peaks pass on to the next stage.

Aion FX notes the TONE control is a full bass/treble balance control, the same topology as a Big Muff tone control but tuned for different frequencies³.

Inside the circuit: three gain stages

Pete Cornish describes the signal path as three sections: a linear DRIVE stage with up to +26dB of gain, feeding a stabilized discrete preamp that overloads smoothly when overdriven, then a "Vari-Class" amplifier stage simulating a failing tube amp². Aion FX's circuit trace fills in the detail³:

1. Stage 1: an op-amp gain stage, very similar to the second op-amp stage of the Cornish SS-3, which drives the hard clipping.
2. Stage 2: a more basic transistor gain stage with an emitter bypass capacitor and a 1nF capacitor from base to emitter.
3. Stage 3: a single-transistor stage set for much higher gain, with base bias set by a 5V precision zener diode and a potentiometer, and a single diode to ground that clips half the waveform above 0.7V.

The NG-3 carries the standard Cornish buffers at its input and output³, a contrast with the NG-2, which Aion FX traced as unbuffered with a different topology altogether: a transistor boost, a Big Muff-style clipping stage with germanium diodes, a silicon Fuzz Face stage and a simple treble-cut tone control³.

Silicon, not germanium

Aion FX classifies the NG-3 as a variable-bias silicon fuzz³. Relative to the NG-2, the germanium transistor pair was replaced with a single silicon transistor, and the clipping stage uses silicon transistors⁴. The trace photos also show an op-amp and an LM4040 zener reference inside, which Aion FX flagged as a sign the circuit holds surprises compared with the earlier pedal³.

Power and ordering

The NG-3 is battery free by design². It needs a 9V DC adapter that is noise free and fully stabilized, capable of supplying 20mA, with a 5.5/2.1mm coax connector and a negative center pin².

The pedal is a custom-built unit: to place an order you email Pete Cornish advising your delivery location⁵. Each unit is hand built, wired and tested by Pete, Lynda and Mingus Cornish⁸. The warranty runs two years from date of purchase, covering repairs of any original manufacturing fault; it is voided if the guarantee labels are damaged or removed, and it is not transferable².

The Deluxe NG-3

A Deluxe NG-3 variant adds a 9V battery (preferred type MN1604) in a removable drawer, switched on when the "IN/PWR ON" jack is inserted⁸. It shares the same three-stage topology and the "goes to 15" description, but its warranty is twelve months rather than the standard NG-3's two years⁸.

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