If you want to clear a room of ladies, start talking guitar gear: It's more effective than sports or cars, and maybe even more than comic books and model trains. But if you happen to play guitar—or just love music—it is something to obsess over the way a chef worships his knives or a painter his brushes.
For a guitar player, tone is your face, your distinguishing mark, your mating call—it is your signature. And the recipe can be as simple as it is seemingly alchemical: a pair of hands, an instrument, an amp, and your selection of pedals—or stomp boxes, so called because they live on the floor in front of you and each comes with a button you step on to activate it. Stomp boxes can conjure a myriad of sounds: swirling phase (as in "Maggot Brain" by Funkadelic), sawing tremolo ("How Soon Is Now?" by the Smiths), church-nave echo (anything by U2), and fuzz, perhaps the most varied and awesome of all stomp box–derived tones.
A fuzzbox is made up of an amplifier and a circuit that clips the incoming signal as it goes through the device. This squashing down has the effect of transforming the input from a sine wave into a square wave, resulting in a sound something like the buzzing of a bee. "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction," for example, featured Keith Richards playing the song's signature riff through an early stomp box called the Maestro Fuzz-Tone FZ-1.
No two boxes are the same, which is what makes the whole sonic quest so addictive. You've got Jimmy Page's sexy overdrive (Sola Sound Tone Bender Professional MK II); the explosive tone of the Stooges' Ron Asheton (Dallas-Arbiter Fuzz Face); the fat, woolly crunch of ZZ Top's Billy F. Gibbons (Bixonic Expandora, vintage Ibanez Tube Screamer, Foxx Tone Machine); and the garage roar of the White Stripes' Jack White (Electro-Harmonix Big Muff Pi). Each one is glorious, and all of these guys, past and present, are hopeless effects addicts—obviously surrounded by enablers and probably highly protective of their tones. When I worked as a musician, I saw players use dummy boxes to hide their absurdly Rube Goldbergian "tone jalopies"—a host of effects chained together in idiosyncratic ways—from would-be poachers.
On the design front (and make no mistake, these colorful jewels, usually priced between $100 and $300, are addictively collectible), there is something fetishistically homemade about stomp boxes. They are often hand-painted, like the ornate creations of Zachary Vex, whose company, Z. Vex, makes the peerless Fuzz Factory, Super Hard-On, and Seek-Trem. Sometimes they're shaped like UFOs, like the classic Fuzz Face, and boast the use of germanium, the chemical element (atomic number 32) that was the material of choice for transistors in early fuzzboxes. The pedals are often numbered, and, of course, according to the strict rules of collecting, the lower numbers tend to sound best; for instance, I'm sure my No. 26 Fulltone Soul-Bender sounds way better than any of the 100-plus models. It goes great with my Lovetone Big Cheese fuzzbox, two Boss CE-1 chorus pedals (or "land mines," as I like to call them), Vox wah-wahs, custom-made Geoffrey Teese midrange booster, Electro-Harmonix Golden Throat talk box (an apparatus that deflects the guitar signal to your mouth via a tube, letting you "talk" with the guitar like Peter Frampton used to do), old-school MXR Phase 90, and an Electro-Harmonix Deluxe Memory Man for crazy delay effects.
When the tone stars align and the harmonics start layering, when your hands are moving effortlessly and the musical ideas are in the zone, you just want to scream "Amen!" and tell everyone how great it is to be alive and rocking out.
