Tone Report Weekly Issue 115 | Page 45

E There is a fuzz out there, friends, unlike anything else in the tome of fuzz, and its name is the SRS EQ Exciter. Only one single specimen is known to exist, and not one thing is known about SRS, any individual engineers, or anything else. It’s as if the gods of fuzz hand-delivered the EQ Exciter unto this earth and then skipped town, content to let only the most blessed warriors seek its spoils. Thankfully, the unit found its way into the hands of the excellent Tonemachines blog and not into the closet of someone unappreciative of such pedal minutiae. However, “minutiae” seems like it’s doing the EQ Exciter a disservice, as if it is but one molecule of common fuzz, cast into the ether amongst millions of others. Unlike so many pedals of the late ‘70s, the EQ Exciter is not a clone of a Fuzz Face or a Big Muff. Unlike its contemporaries, the EQ Exciter is a unique circuit, and oddly enough, the apex of its uniqueness lies within its ambiguously named EQ control. In keeping tradition with the series of misnomers written on the pedal, the EQ control isn’t an EQ control at all—it’s more like a deep filter sweep much in the vein of an era-appropriate synthesizer. Aside from that, the EQ Exciter is a deceptively named balls-out, thick and throaty fuzz that would have likely blown audiences away with its harmonically-rich, bottom-heavy sound. Trust me, this thing can make a Telecaster sound like an audience-evaporating doom-soaked antimatter cannon, but it plays nice on the high strings as well. ToneReport.com 45