Robert Fripp

Robert Fripp is the guitarist of King Crimson, and the player most famously linked to the Burns Baldwin Buzzaround, a vintage fuzz pedal produced in the 1960s¹². His gear story runs from that rare fuzz, through pedalboards built by Pete Cornish, to the tape looping with Brian Eno that became known as Frippertronics³.

The Buzzaround years

The Buzzaround is a fuzz pedal from the '60s, not too dissimilar from the Tone Bender but heavier-sounding, and it has become a collector's item⁸. Premier Guitar notes that at the time, it was King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp's fuzz of choice⁹, and Guitar World calls it a critical element of his tone from King Crimson's "21st Century Schizoid Man" onward¹⁰.

Fripp did own two Buzzarounds, and he says he used the pedal on the early Giles, Giles and Fripp recordings, and also early on with King Crimson⁴. Fuzzboxes.org lists the tracks where it appears⁵:

• "21st Century Schizoid Man"⁵
• "Pictures of a City"⁵

Either one or both of his Buzzarounds were eventually rehoused into a rackmount unit, according to Tony Arnold⁵.

In a 1974 Guitar Player interview, Fripp described his stage setup at the time:

On the fuzz itself, he was direct:

Before the Buzzaround, Fripp also recalled playing with a "WEM fuzz box", in a response to a reader's enquiry about King Crimson's "21st Century Schizoid Man"¹³.

The "Heroes" question

A long-running story holds that Fripp used the Buzzaround on David Bowie's "Heroes", on which he played the guitar parts. Fripp refutes it. Guitar Player reports that the claim "has been refuted" by Fripp himself⁴, and fuzzboxes.org states that Fripp refutes the allegation that the Buzzaround was used for his guitar parts on the record⁵. The timeline supports him: photos of King Crimson suggest he had stopped using Buzzaround pedals by the early 1970s, using pedals like Guild's Foxey Lady for his distorted sounds instead⁵.

Fripp's fuzzes, in the order he used them:

By around 1972, his pedalboards were built with Guild-branded triangle Big Muffs, which is where that sustained sound came from¹⁵.

The Cornish pedalboards

Pete Cornish built King Crimson's pedal boards⁶:

• Two boards for Robert Fripp⁶
• Two boards for David Cross⁶
• A tiny one for John Wetton⁶

Cornish built his first pedal board for Fripp in September 1973, and it included the Guild Foxey Lady, Guild's version of the Big Muff Fuzz⁶.

When Fripp and David Cross came to Cornish, they wanted something specific:

So Fripp's boards ran on batteries rather than mains power, at a time when that was not yet the norm.

Frippertronics and looping

Fripp's other gear legacy is looping. In the 1970s, he and Brian Eno shone more light on reel-to-reel tape experimentation, a method dubbed "Frippertronics"³. The technique rests on looped tape echo, of which Fripp is an exponent alongside Terry Riley and Brian Eno¹⁶. He went on to build soundscapes on stage with looping pedals, the approach BOSS cites when describing what loopers can do for a player¹⁷.

His own description of it, quoted by BOSS:

GuitarPlayer's reviewer places Fripp among the avant-garde guitarists whose ambient style loopers have traditionally served¹⁸, and his sustained, layered sound remains the reference point players reach for when discussing the Buzzaround's place in fuzz history¹⁹.