The “fuzz sculptor with an appetite” has beefy fuzz, woolly fuzz, Smashing Pumpkins-style fuzz, you name it...
(Image credit: Pigtronix)
Choosing a new fuzz pedal is up there with the most difficult designs a guitar player will ever face. No, wait. It’s up there with some of the most important life decisions.
Going to college? Getting a puppy? Small potatoes. Fuzz is a tough one; there’s just so much choice. But maybe Pigtronix has just rolled out a solution for those losing sleep over pedalboard procurement.
The Star Eater Super Jumbo Fuzz arrives with pleasing aesthetic for those of us who lived through the VHS era, and a heap of tones for the fuzz-curious. With three over-sized purple dials, two pale blue rocker switches and a dual-footswitch design, it serves up a greatest hits of fuzz sounds.
(Image credit: Pigtronix)
There are vintage fuzz tones without the vintage fuzz issues of component drift. There are warm fuzzy carpet tones that clean up nicely and react to your picking dynamics and electric guitar volume knob.
There are silicon-fuzz sounds that reference those early ‘90s Smashing Pumpkins sounds, as demonstrated in the video below. And all of this looks easy enough to use.
The Star Eater is a fuzz that feeds into a footswitchable boosted filter stage that can dramatically change the sound of the effect.
When this filter stage is activated via the Contour footswitch, the filter is applied, and controlled via the Sweep dial and a two-way rocker switch selecting between Bump and Scoop voicings. The Sweep control is only in play when the Contour footswitch is active.
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The fuzz, meanwhile, is controlled by Hunger (the amount of gain in the signal) and Volume, which controls output level, with silicon and germanium modes selected by rocker switch.
Top-mounted jacks round out a snazzily designed enclosure. Priced $179, the Star Eater is available now. And unlike a puppy, it won’t eat that much. Just feed it 9V DC from your pedalboard power supply and it’ll be as happy as Larry.
Jonathan Horsley has been writing about guitars since 2005, playing them since 1990, and regularly contributes to publications including Guitar World, MusicRadar and Total Guitar. He uses Jazz III nylon picks, 10s during the week, 9s at the weekend, and shamefully still struggles with rhythm figure one of Van Halen’s Panama.
