ZVex Fuzz Factory

Its sure is well built and good looking but at the end of the day, the time you need to invest in order to get usable tones makes the Fuzz Factory an overall unpleasant to use pedal for the average guitar hobbyist/player. I spent hours (honestly!) to fully explore the settings only to realize that its just to "unpredictable" for me. Taking that aside, if you do succeed in your quest for "a tone" you might be lucky enough to find "The Tone". In order words it can sound great but just dont make the mistake of moving any knobs after that...ever again...in your lifetime...

It takes a while to master this pedal, but it is well worth it. I like it best in power-starved mode, for a loose, saxophone-like buzz. Be careful when using it live, a little turn of the wrong knob will turn it into a wailing banshee.

I use a DIY Fuzz Factory clone I built a few years ago. Sounds pretty close to the real thing. Great for really gnarly fuzz and crackly feedback.

Incredibly versatile! It's the pedal that showed me that sometimes it's better to have more than just a level, a tone, and a gain on your fuzz box!

This is one of my favorite pedals. It cuts through and it has a real cool tone. Not for everybody though.

I bought this pedal off of a friend, and it was worth every cent let me tell you. Not only can you get everything from a bright, brittle classic fuzz to a thick and syrupy synth-like sound and everything in between, but so many variables can alter the sound drastically that it's like a new adventure every time you sit down with it - messing with your volume and tone can help shape the tonality, attack, and pitch of the self oscillation (which i've straight up used as it's own instrument, tweaking knobs to get cool effects and melodies). It's very quickly found a place on my main board and in my music, as it does both thick chords (especially in my primary tuning, Open C; it just stacks like an impossibly driven amplifier) as well as hard-defined and impactful single-note runs. Live, I run it before my wah and use it to get INSANE filter sweeps.

Two biggest downsides for me are as follows: 1. it's piss-poor with bass, at least in my experience. It doesn't seem to handle the bass frequencies well, regardless of which pickups, strings, or necks are being used (though so far it works BEST with just a bridge humbucker active). Second issue is that, due to how finicky it is, it's hard to recall past settings, 'cause even the slightest tweak can throw self osculation out of pitch or cut off note tails too soon or what not. As such, i tend to focus less on finding a "Sweet spot" and more just grabbing "what's working right now for this", especially since i'll likely mess with the parameters later on anyway for some noisy-play. But the sound and playability of just the pedal itself easily make up for it. Since I rely on backing tracks a lot to pull off my industrial style, this pedal alone has injected some much needed organic feel to my sets, and has opened up a whole door of possibilities for me, as i plan on investing in more fuzzes (as well as compact synths).

One of the nastiest fuzz pedals I've ever used. It's like a Russian Big Muff without all the distortion and more sustain. I highly recommend this for any budding punk guitarist.