ZVEX Woolly Mammoth 7

The ZVEX Woolly Mammoth 7 is a fuzz pedal from ZVEX Effects, introduced for the holiday season in November 2015¹. ZVEX describes it as "an expanded version of our mighty Woolly Mammoth," keeping the subharmonic weight and ripping fuzz of the original Woolly Mammoth while adding a three-band tone stack and a second footswitch²¹. Like the original, it is a pedal that bass players and guitar players both use; MusicRadar called the Woolly Mammoth line "a perennial favourite among bass and guitar players"³.

The headline change is a Marshall-style tone stack with Bass, Mid and Treble controls, and a footswitch that takes the whole tone circuit out of the signal path when you do not want it²³. Each of the two fuzz voices, EQ on and EQ off, gets its own volume control, so you can balance them and jump between them on the fly¹.

An expanded Woolly Mammoth with a tone stack

The original Woolly Mammoth is ZVEX's bass fuzz, a four-knob pedal with Output, EQ, Pinch and Wool controls, a gentle noise gate, and an EQ knob that smoothly selects between more bass and more treble⁵⁶. ZVEX describes it as "this incredibly sub-frequency-preserving unit will hold on to the lowest lows like no fuzz ever heard before"⁵. The Vexter version is described as "Designed for bass, a favorite for guitar"⁶.

The Woolly Mammoth 7 keeps that character but replaces the single EQ knob with a full tone stack. Where the original gives you one knob sweeping between bass and treble, the WM7 gives you Bass, Mid and Treble controls in a Marshall-style arrangement, plus the ability to switch the whole stack out of the circuit². ZVEX says the fuzz without the EQ "has its own unique voice, much different from the sound of a WM7 with tone stack, or the single tone knob" of the standard Woolly Mammoth, and describes it as "more linear, with pronounced mid frequencies"²¹.

MusicRadar's Michael Astley-Brown framed the pedal at launch as an update to the long-running original³:

MusicRadar, November 2015³

The pedal also has what MusicRadar called "a rather snazzy Plexiglas window, which allows players to see exactly what's going on inside" the enclosure³.

The controls and footswitches

The WM7 carries over the core Woolly Mammoth control set and adds the tone stack and its footswitch²¹³.

The two footswitches are the practical heart of the pedal. One engages the fuzz, and the lower-left switch toggles the tone stack, which MusicRadar described as enabling "on-the-fly fuzz tweaks"³. Because Vol 1 and Vol 2 are independent, the EQ-on and EQ-off voices can each be set to their own level rather than one volume knob serving both¹.

For comparison, the standard Woolly Mammoth's Output knob "lets you control how much signal is coming from the Woolly Mammoth," and its EQ knob is a single sweep from more bass to more treble⁴.

Hand-painted and limited versions

The Woolly Mammoth 7 is hand painted, and ZVEX notes that on its hand painted pedals colors and details may vary from unit to unit²⁵. Hand painted pedals carry a lifetime warranty².

The Woolly Mammoth line has seen several special and limited versions:

• Sylvia Massy Woolly Mammoth: a special edition of 60 units, each hand-assembled and hand-numbered, with UV-printed artwork by Sylvia Massy⁷.
• Daniel Buettner Woolly Mammoth 7 (B096): a one-off painted variant whose "parts are otherwise identical to the Woolly Mammoth 7"⁸.
• Germanium Woolly Mammoth: a limited edition with the same four knobs as the standard version (Output, EQ, Pinch, Wool), built around germanium transistors instead of the silicon-based original⁹.
• Screaming Females limited run: Marissa Paternoster teamed up with ZVEX to create a limited run of Woolly Mammoth pedals featuring her original artwork¹⁰.

The Vexter version of the Woolly Mammoth is listed as sold out⁶, as are the one-of-a-kind hand painted U015 and U018 units.

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