ZVEX Woolly Mammoth Vexter

The ZVEX Woolly Mammoth Vexter is a fuzz pedal from ZVEX, built for bass players but equally at home with guitar. ZVEX describes it as an "incredibly sub-frequency-preserving unit" that "will hold on to the lowest lows like no fuzz ever heard before"¹. That low-end retention is the whole point of the pedal: where many fuzzes thin out a bass signal, the Woolly Mammoth circuit is voiced to keep the fundamental intact.

The Vexter is the lower-priced, screen-printed version of the hand-painted ZVEX Woolly Mammoth, carrying the same circuit in a plainer finish. ZVEX listed it at $279.00, against $399.00 for the hand-painted original¹². The maker's product page currently lists the Vexter as sold out¹.

A bass fuzz that holds on to the lowest lows

The Woolly Mammoth line is a long-running fixture in the bass pedal world. MusicRadar called it "Z.Vex's long-running, low-end-enhancing Woolly Mammoth fuzz," "a perennial favourite among bass and guitar players"³. Analog Man, which sells and services ZVEX pedals, lists it simply as "The Woolly Mammoth Bass Fuzz," noting that guitarists love it too⁴.

The maker's own description of the sound is direct:

ZVEX Effects, product page¹

For guitar players, the same circuit has drawn praise from reviewers. Pedal of the Day, reviewing the Woolly Mammoth in 2017, wrote that "today's bass-oriented fuzz sounds incredible on guitar," with "a tremendous bottom end beautiful harmonic structure for any six-string machine to bond with"⁵.

The EQ control and the gate

Two features define how the Woolly Mammoth Vexter behaves in use: its single EQ control and its built-in gate¹.

The EQ control. ZVEX says the pedal "has an EQ control that smoothly selects between more bass and more treble"¹. Pedal of the Day described the same control in more detail: it "tilts the spectral response, adding in more low end and easing up on the treble and mid frequencies as you turn it counterclockwise"⁵. Analog Man calls it "a muff-like eq knob" that lets you tune exactly how much high end comes through⁴. In practice it works as a single-knob tilt control rather than a multi-band tone stack.

The gate. ZVEX says the pedal "features a gentle gate for silencing your instrument between notes or phrases"¹. Fuzz circuits can hiss and rumble when you stop playing; the gate quietly closes the pedal's output during those gaps. The same gentle gate carries across the Woolly Mammoth family, including the limited Germanium Woolly Mammoth Mod of 2018, which gearnews noted "includes a Noise Gate" as usual⁶.

The classic ZVex control layout on the Woolly Mammoth family, as described by gearnews on the Germanium Mod, consists of four knobs⁶:

Related Woolly Mammoth versions

The Vexter sits in a wider Woolly Mammoth family, and the differences between versions are mostly about finish, price and features rather than the core sound⁷⁸⁹.

The Woolly Mammoth 7, released for the 2015 holiday season¹², is the most feature-rich of the family. ZVEX calls it "an expanded version of our Mighty Woolly Mammoth," packing "the subharmonic wallop and ripping fuzz of the original Woolly Mammoth with new custom tweaks"⁷. It adds independent volume controls for EQ on (Vol 1) and EQ off (Vol 2)¹², which MusicRadar described as two volume controls that "adjust the levels for tone stack on and off settings"³. It also carries a Plexiglas window so you can see the circuit inside¹², and it is a physically larger box at 4.80" x 3.64" x 2.10", against the Vexter's 4.70" x 2.38" x 1.82"¹⁷. At launch in 2015, the hand-painted Woolly Mammoth 7 sold for $499³.

The Germanium Woolly Mammoth Mod arrived in July 2018 as a limited edition. Guitar.com described it as a chance to achieve "a warm, vintage-y fuzz that works just as well for electric blues leads as biting punk riffs," in contrast to the silicon-based variant most players already knew¹¹. It kept the classic Output, EQ, Pinch and Wool layout and the usual noise gate, and listed for $299⁶¹¹.

The Sylvia Massy edition is a collector's version: 60 units, each hand-assembled and hand-numbered, with UV-printed artwork by producer and engineer Sylvia Massy, at the same $399.00 price as the standard hand-painted pedal¹⁰. ZVEX describes it as "a monstrous fuzz pedal that delivers crushing low end for bassists while also blistering on guitar"¹⁰.

ZVEX has also sold one-off and custom-shop Woolly Mammoths, including hand-painted U-series units at $479.00 and $489.00 (both sold out) and a Mod Bench experiment, the WM2219, built in a sample Sylvia Massy enclosure with a transistor in a package similar to the stock Fuzz Factory 2N404, offered at $399.00^21013149.

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