Imperfect Circuits Reactor

Transistor Fuzz

A fuzz circuit that sounds a bit wild and out of control.

This pedal turns your signal into a sawtooth-style fuzz and accentuates string noise, harmonics, and just sounds aggressive overall - something harsh, broken sounding, and wild.

While we are not usually a fan of ‘weird’ names for controls, we felt like this pedal deserved it. ‘Load’ adjusts the input gain - but this pedal does not get very clean. If you play with chords, turning this down may sound better - but for single string riffs or solos, you’ll want to turn it up. ‘Control Rod’ is a passive tilt-shift EQ. On one end the bass drops out and the treble frequencies shine. Turn the knob the other way and the opposite happens - the treble is attenuated and the sound becomes bassy and warm.

Two special LEDs contribute to the aesthetic. The ‘Load’ LED flashes with incoming signal - which made us think of Geiger-counters. The ‘Control Rod’ LED morphs between red, yellow, and green as the relevant knob is turned. This made us think of how control rods can change and modulate a nuclear reaction. You might notice ‘SCRAM’ written by the bypass switch. It stands for ‘SAFETY CONTROL ROD AXE MAN,’ which is a real acronym used on emergency-shutdown switches. We thought it would be fun to put it on the pedal’s “off” switch.

Each unit is hand-assembled by us using through-hole components and packed into a 125B enclosure - which is powder-coated and UV printed.

It is powered off of 9V - no adapter is included. The jack is wired to be center-negative, which should match the majority of pedal power supplies. Please double check before plugging power into your pedal. There is no battery option, it can only be powered via the 9VDC jack.