Fuzz

A thick, sustaining fuzz in the Big Muff tradition. Two waveshaping stages stacked in series turn anything from a single oscillator to a full drum bus into saturated, singing grit — with a tone control that sweeps from dark and scooped to bright and buzzy.

How it works

The signal passes through two sigmoid clipping stages back to back, with high-pass filtering between them to keep the low end tight. A small asymmetric bias before the first stage skews the waveshape, adding an octave-up ghost note and the spitty, ragged edge that distinguishes a fuzz from a smoother overdrive. The left and right channels run as two fully independent chains, so a stereo source stays stereo.

Controls

  • Drive — how hard the input is pushed into the two clipping stages; low settings give a hairy edge, high settings give wall-of-sound sustain.
  • Tone — a post-distortion low-pass sweeping from 600 Hz (dark, scooped Big-Muff body) up to 10 kHz (bright, bee-in-a-jar buzz). The defining timbral control.
  • Bias — sets the asymmetry pushed into the first clipping stage. At 0% the waveshape clips symmetrically for a rounder, odd-harmonic square fuzz with no octave; at the default 40% you get the classic Muff octave-up flavour; toward 100% the skew deepens into strong even-harmonic ghost notes and a gated, spitty dying-battery sputter at high drive.
  • Mix — blends the dry input against the fuzzed signal; 100% is fully wet.

Inputs & outputs

  • In L / In R — the audio to fuzz; patch a single voice or a whole submix.
  • Drive / Tone / Bias / Mix CV — voltage control over each knob; patch an LFO or envelope for swells, filter-like tone motion, shifting harmonic symmetry on the fly, or pumping the wet blend.
  • Out L / Out R — the processed stereo signal.

Tips

  • Sweep Tone CV with an envelope for a wah-like vocal quality on sustained chords.
  • Back Mix off to layer fuzz under a clean signal — keeps the attack intact while adding sustain and harmonics underneath.
  • Push Bias up under heavy Drive for a gated, sputtering "dying-battery" texture, or drop it to 0% when you want a cleaner, more symmetrical square-wave grind.