That’s right, the 60’s pedal looked like some alien spaceship and was made famous by the great Jimi Hendrix! That red (or black or gray or blue) flying saucer made some of thegreatest classic rock tones in the minds of the guitar players, I mean, us. Maybe the guy even came to Earth inside that thing, who knows? And of course the name BOG comes from Band Of Gypsys; for me his tone started to change by the time Electric Ladyland was recorded and later on we hear the epitome of Jimi’s tone: clear, full, articulate, big, crushing, dynamic… He seemed to finally have it all there! So here is my tribute.

The idea here is not to reproduce only Band of Gypsys tones, but to get the vintage soul of the classic FF, yeah, the big round box he loved so much, with a “hi-fi” touch. But if you’ve ever read Roger Mayer interviews on books about Jimi’s sound, and I’ve read many, you know that going conservative on the Arbiter factory schematic and specs isn’t the smartest move. Mr. Mayer claims he made a lot of improvements and modifications to the boxes, sometimes even adding more gain/clipping stages both before and after the main fuzz circuit.

He also says he started messing with silicon transistors around 1968 because of lower noise and higher stability (’68 = Electric Ladyland, see how we’re going somewhere here?); and that the FF circuit wasn’t the only thing inside Jimi’s fuzz boxes, especially later on his career. To me, that means the conservative approach is a no-no (and that goes along with the whole Deep Trip concept of going for tones, rather than factory drawings).

So I took some months with all my favorites (vintage originals, boutique versions, clones, replicas, reissues and work-alikes), together with all my old Deep Trip pedals and prototypes, to extract, compare and match the attack, voicing and decay for my ultimate favorite version of that famous circuit, always listening to the man, and then I did it my way (that means no compromises). Last but not least, it got all the Deep Trip goodies it could: correct impedance input and output stages (to work with wahs, buffers, any pedals, any amps), external bias control, external bass and treble content controls… so you have a modified FF vintage soul in the core, much more control all around and none of the vintage issues, how do you like that? And OH, my added “hi-fi” approach to the circuit brought a heavy and firm bottom end that’s so hard to hear in any fuzz box, it sounds gorgeous!

Some say the BOG isn’t exactly a fuzz pedal, but rather a fuzz/overdrive/distortion/whatever you need. It does a lot of different sounds and goes way beyond the typical Fuzz Face/Jimi Hendrix coverage, trust me.

Product specs