The London builder’s latest pairs an analogue op-amp fuzz with a digitally controlled mic, so your amp and your room become part of the sound.
Rainger FX has built a fuzz pedal with a microphone inside it, and the whole idea is to let it feed back.
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The Microphonic Fuzz comes from David Rainger’s London operation and follows on from Amp Crash, his collaboration with Death By Audio that packed a 3-watt amp, a 2″ speaker and a mic into one enclosure. There’s no speaker this time. Instead, a mic tucked just behind the grill on the pedal’s end panel listens to your amp and the room, then feeds that sound back through the circuit, so the pedal’s position, its distance from the amp and the room’s reflections all shape what comes out. Even turning the pedal 90 degrees changes which frequencies feed back.
The fuzz side is analogue, a dual-stage op-amp design with plenty of gain that isn’t very saggy and cleans up well when you roll back the guitar’s volume. A three-way Tone Profile switch moves between a mid-heavy voicing, a heavily scooped one with strong bass and treble, and a full-range setting that combines the two, with a Hi Freq knob for overall treble.
The mic side is digitally controlled and has its own footswitch. Mic Level sets how much of the room gets in, while a pair of strong low and high filters steer the feedback towards a particular note, such as the key of the song, or away from a squeal. A Rate knob adds square-wave tremolo to the mic signal only, chopping sustained feedback into stuttering pulses, and a shallow flange runs on the mic by default so the feedback doesn’t settle on one piercing pitch. A gate switch on top helps keep it all in check.
There’s an external mic input as well, so a mic placed in front of the drum kit can send the drums through your amp and the rest of your pedalboard. On battery power the pedal can be held up and sung into, and through headphones the mic adds the acoustic sound of your strings and pick rather than feedback.
Rainger FX warns that the open mic can produce feedback loud enough to damage hearing, so it pays to bring the Mic Level up slowly. The Microphonic Fuzz runs on 9V power or an internal battery and is available now
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