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SoundLad Liverpool original design, this is not a clone - Designed, hand wired, and assembled in Liverpool, UK
Players notes - Voltage Starve-able Big M type pedal re-configured as a boost to utilise an amps preamp and create the sound of a Big M pedal being played into a loud amplifier at much lower volumes. Includes mids control, front end boost, and is tuned to within an inch of it's life to be the most...everything. Massive output from the start, insanely wide EQ sweep, designed to be the dirtiest of dirty boosts. Note clarity in chords is bang on and responds very well to playing dynamics. Lots of fun. It does loads of things that other things do too but we whole heartedly recommend chucking the song book out the window, forgetting everything you think you know about pedals, plugging straight in, putting nothing between this and your amp and making something new. Any effects are best placed in the effects loop of your amp (search "4 cable method"). If you notice a huge volume difference between the Power Fuzz and your clean tone, slowly increase the gain dial on your amplifier until they level out.
We reckon there's no better sound than a sick distortion pedal absolutely smashing the front end of a loud and dirty amp. The Power Fuzz started out life as one of the sickest pedals going, the venerable "Migbuff Pie", and has been designed to slam the front end of an amp harder than you could ever think possible. If a Migbuff was a chimp, these thing are Leonardo Da Vinci mate! If you are expecting to drop it into your pedalboard though, dial it like you would any other pedal, and send it in to a beautifully crafted wide open clean channel, it will hurt you, and you will cry. You plug these nasty Castors into the front end of a dirty amp like they did in the good old days though, and you're going to discover things you never knew were possible. Tight crunching distortions. Sustains that go on for days. Sludgy power doom. Synthy pads. Nasty, spitting growls. Trashy, thrashy, mashed up messes. Sub octaves crawling out from the deep and ring mods raining down from on high.
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Genuine Hammond enclosures
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Painted, drilled, and printed by HammondMFG UK
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Off board Input and Output Jacks & DC Jack
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Off board True Bypass Switching
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High Quality SMD and through hole components
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Fully ISO9001 and RoHS compliant
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Runs on 9v Center Negative (Boss style) power supply​
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Current Draw: 4mA
Separately voiced stacked gain controls. Roughly speaking, on the Hungry Beaver "Meat" is thick and chunky like a modern "NYC" sound whereas "Gravy" is less so with more mids, like a classic 70's "Purple Ram" sound. On the Private Beaver, "Scoff" is a Bubble Font Green Russian flavour and "Chow" is a Red Army Overdrive" inspired overdrive. Because they are stacked you can blend them to your own flavour of pie filling. The dial response is designed to massively open up those "early in the sustain dial" tight distortion tones of a Migbuff while still having all the chunk and fuzz you need at the top end. When the pedal is starved the dials change function. The "Meat/Scoff" controls adjusts the amount of fuzz and the "Gravy/Chow" control adjusts the sustain/gate, as far as we can tell. These dials make an awful racket when you turn them, Don't Panic, this is normal. Just hit a chord as you turn them and you should barely notice it.
Work in conjunction to adjust Treble/Mids/Bass response. The "Tone" control adjusts treble and bass frequencies while shifting the mid scoop position for matching to different amplifiers. The "Mids" control adjusts the depth of the mids from full mid scoop to no mid scoop, sorting out those "in the mix" problems once and for all. Fully to the left is more scooped than these kind of circuits would normally be, even the modern ones, fantastic for synthy tones, fully to the right is reminiscent of a "tone bypass" response, while still retaining the functionality of the tone control.
Starves parts of the circuit of voltage and current to produce a huge range of sounds from full on chunky muffler type sounds to velcro fuzz, gated synth sounds, octaves, splatty nonsense and raucous nastiness. The interplay between this control and the "Meat/Scoff" and "Gravy"/Chow control is the real heart of this pedal. After about 12 o-clock crank the Meat/Scoff and Gravy/Chow controls and have a play. Top tip - try stacking notes, 3rd's, 4th's, 5th's to play with what sub octave is generated. Lot's of fun.
This dial comes with a warning. The Power Fuzz range are is BOOSTS, not straight forward fuzzes. The Power Fuzz is the loudest pedal you will ever play. With over 30dB of boost at full tilt, the beavers starts where all other pedals end.
Make your amp dirty-ish..."edge of breakup" type stuff and set the volume on the pedal to zero. Treat your "gain" dial on your amp like a "compression" dial. Turn the "gain" up on your amp to reduce the difference in volume between your Beaver at zero and your clean sound, then use the VOLUME control on the Beaver to drive the front end of your amp. Even when starving it to death use the volume to smash that front end for all kinds of madness.
Comparison between the two...
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Demo to follow. In short, Hungry Beaver is the more "modern" of the two. Tighter bass, higher gain, and sits well in a modern "rock" mix.
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Private Beaver is made more for bigger, lo-fi, boomier type mixes. Old drumkits in big rooms and the likes. The increased bass, looser gain structure and lower mid focus make a great accompanyment for loose bass skins and midsy cymbals, the more "indie" of the two.
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Both share quite a similar tonestack so in isolation can be made to sound almost the same, the main differences become apparent when in a mix and adapting it to a mix.
The gain structure of the Hungry Beaver is faster, smaller grain size, fizzier, whereas the Private Beaver is crunchier, bigger, amd churns rather than buzzes.
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The "STARVE" control on the Hungry Beaver introduces a mid cut that is different to the frequencies controlled by the "MIDS" dial. This was done to preserve the "modern" mix placement while offering some sharp synthy sounds on the starve.
The MIDS dial on the Private Beaver controls the same mid frequencies as the mid cut introduced by the "STARVE" control. Here the starve control is tuned to work more like a more traditional vintage dead battery type sound. It still gets sharp, it still gets raspy, but now it can be dialed back into where it was in the mix by using the MIDS control to restore the frequencies lost in the starving process.
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Private Beaver is a fair bit louder than the Hungry Beaver.
Private Beaver was made completely by accident while trying to find a replacement for the now discontinued 5088 transistors used in the Hungry Beaver. There was a bit of a component shortage at the time of development so we went to our suppliers, filtered by stock most to least and whatever transistor was at the top was going to be the one we'd use. The Hungry Beaver MK2 was built and tuned and sounding great, so out of curiosity we decided to see if any "Big-M" type pedals had been produced with the transistor we had. Turns out the answer was yes, the Bubble Font Green Russian. We searched for the schematic and it turns out, aside from the SoundLad Power Fuzz mods and a couple of components different here and there, we had produced almost an exact clone. That same week we managed to acquire a fairly sizeable stash of 5088 transistors. Tempting to stop with the MK2 at that point, but we kept plugging in and actually started to prefer it to the OG, especially with the Crestwood Custom and some "Black Keys" type backing tracks so it was then fully developed as the "Private Beaver", proper paint job and all.
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Sales pitch aside...The Beavers have been designed and voiced to utilise the preamp of your amplifier to achieve that "big gig" crunch and compression that comes from a power amp at full tilt but at much lower volumes. Along the way we fixed pretty much all of the more traditional problems with these kind of circuits, (tone sucking input, bass filter on volume control, no mids, all or nothing S control) and employed a bunch of original mods to open up opportunity for new "never heard before" guitar tones.
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There's a bit of a learning curve but once you get it you're in for a treat.
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There's a plethora of words on the internet used to describe sounds. Rather than bombard you with adjectives we'd recommend you just watch the demo's below. It does a lot.
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For fans of FZZ FCTRY, MIG BUFF, FILTH
*Does not take batteries... stop using batteries you pigs!*
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