


Guts
Words from the Captain -
Man, see yourself!
Know the true desires of your soul. Feel the love of amplification, the hunger for distortion, the ecstasy of your transistorized actions tearing through the cosmos.
When is your mind at peace? Only when your guitar screams with ghastly FUZZ. When are you truly satisfied? Only when wood and steel are in your hands, obsession in your heart and the roar of germanium filth is searing through your ears.
Deceive yourself not! The distorted audio wave is sheer delight to you. Archaic technologies are your supreme fascination. Lose your mind. Indulge in the highest form of your desires. Behold! The D*A*M Dark Flesh DF-75. The crowning glory of my thaumaturgy.
Come forth in your savage might, rampant with your lust for FUZZ, comprehend the improbable creation in your sight. For this is for the initiated mind not the lifeless poser seeking cheap thrills. Death to the pocket sized mass-produced weakling, hail to the machinery born of blood by solitary hand!
Gain, gain and more gain. So much damn gain that it'll split atoms. To achieve this disgusting amount of saturation, the circuit is hybridized. But I stress, you will not hear it. The two critical stages, Q1 and Q3 are germanium, Q2 and, the thing that should not be, Q4 are silicon. I had three tag words for the sonic objective of this project. Brutal. Savage. Precision. This equation makes it happen. The fourth gain stage is obviously not present in a vintage MKII, nor in any previous Flesh themed devices. It adds a whole new layer of what the fuck to the experience and gives this Fleshy creation God like volume levels.
With all that said, it should be noted that control for gain, AKA Sustain, is completely different in form and function to that of a traditional voltage feedback circuit (MKII. MKI.5, Fuzz Face, etc.)
In a nutshell, it functions in a more practical and uniform manner, with a very even spread of control right across the rotation of the dial.
The overall feel is powerful, the ambience is complex, but the MKII origins can be felt and heard. The low end is very heavy but tight. It will not become sticky or lack dynamic response even at its maximum bass setting. Hopefully, I haven't taken this tuning and tightening of the timbre too far to the extreme for your tastes. It's certainly the Dark Flesh, the next level. Visually and sonically, the evolution is present.
Guts. So you're gonna design a precision fuzz box killing machine that'll outlive every human being you know. Do you:
A) Use a bunch of old shit with bad tolerances, horrible drift, and poor signal-to-noise ratio. That look 'cool'
or
B) high specification parts that are intended for use in an audio circuit, offer excellent performance and longevity and actually are 'the best parts available'
You guessed it, it's B.
I know old shit looks awesome, but it really felt like a stupid fucking thing to do with this design. Everything you see is either high tolerance and/or the smartest thing to do for its given role. All critical resistors have a -/+0.01% tolerance, capacitors are either polystyrene, polymer, tantalum or polypropylene, AKA this shit will last and not fail in a year's time. So aside from the Mullard devices (nothing modern even comes close) it's all new top shelf occurrences.
So without actually writing a book about this damn pedal, I actually could, I'll just say it's a pedal made by me actually punching at my weight, as in, not just making the moneys on the rinse and repeat. It should be a new experience for you, though strangely familiar, and hopefully one rewarding you with a decent head rush once the beast is cranked hard!
Huge mahoosive thank you to Dave for not only agreeing to this but for completing the trifecta, words can’t express my gratitude enough
Trifecta -
It’s literally just landed so I’m gonna need some serious playtime and at serious volume, let the games begin