Re: OT: distortion pedal advice

[Alexandre Tavares Frias <atfrias@ibm.net>]

> Michael Tuminello wrote:
>
> > I'm looking for a distorion pedal.
>
> > I'm particularly a Prince fan, but you could think NIN, Duran Duran,
> > vs. the warm fuzzy classic rock sound.

I'm a great fan of  fuzz boxes. Although I aprecciate some good tube amp
overdrive,
extreme fuzz is what I'm really in... I also think this matter may be of
some interest
to other music/noise makers, not only guitar players (like me) who abuse of
effects.

BigMuff was my first real fuzz and now I have 2 very old of them, very
thick sound,
lots of sustain and lows.
An old Colorsound Tonebender Fuzz - more to the 'velcro-sound' than the
BigMuff.
Mine has some minor problems related to age, I don't want to fix them cos
it sounds
so good that it's too much risk for me!
An old M3emthree MINI SYNTHY ( Let me know if any of you have any info
about
this beast, I had never found any other person who owns one). It's a fuzz
(velcro-sound)
with one and two sub-octave square wave settings. It is presented as a
'put-on-your-belt
unit (not a stomp box, sorry!) and has three knobs for mixing the signals
from nomal(?)
fuzz, square-wave one octave down and square-wave two octave down. It have
lots of
sustain and balls, tracking is on the semichaotic side. It becomes a
monster synth with a
little help of an e-bow.
A new Vintage TheRat, more BigMuffish but not so fuzzy, very strong and
reliable.
A new Roctron PurpleHaze octave pedal, I love it! You can get a mix of
fuzz, one up and
one down octaves at the same time.
I have a Boss ME-5 with some distortions I still use and a recently
acquired Korg AX1G.
The AX1G is nice but once you get those old and new analog stomps you think
twice
about using one of its internal distortions, but the RingModulator
algorithm  took the place
of my old beloved Craig Anderton's project for musicians stomp box.

My two objects of desire right now are the old red box Foxx Tone Machine
and Z.Vex
'anything'. The prices for the Z.Vex's here in Brasil, no, no... I'm
thinking about build the
Foxx from some schematics at some Internet sites as the used ones are
costing too much.

[]'s,

Alex Frias.