Maxon FF10 Fuzz Elements Earthbound Audio
Fire
Pale Mare
For the FF10 Fire fuzz, a pedal from its
Fuzz Elements line, Maxon chose to focus
its efforts on making a compact, affordable
version of the Roland Bee Baa circuit that
devotes itself to the fuzzy side of the original’s
personality. Given the trio of footswitches,
quartet of knobs, and the general bigness
of the original Bee Baa, shrinking it down
without watering it down was likely a tough
proposition, but Maxon nailed it with the
FF10. Provided one doesn’t care much about
the treble boost, the FF10 is perfect for
Bee Baa admirers who can’t come to grips
with the original’s massive enclosure or high
vintage price tag. It sells for 169 bucks, has
controls for Sustain, Level and Tone, and a
pair of footswitches; one true bypass and one
for toggling between the muscular, Muff-ier
tones and the “Notch” setting, which scoops
mids and cranks the high-end sizzle for that
cutting old-school sting for which the Bee
Baa is known.
This Bee Baa variant is built by none other than
Earthbound Audio, creator of the absolutely
apocalyptic Supercollider distortion-fuzz, a
legendary pedal which Tone Report Weekly
has heaped praise upon before. It is no surprise
then that the company’s Pale Mare is such a
ripping, snarling, Bee Baa-ing monster. Like
many modern reproductions of this circuit,
it skips the treble boost section in favor of a
more fully realized fuzz onslaught. The Pale
Mare offers a dual-footswitch layout, with
the second switch being used to engage the
scoop filter, which has a dedicated knob for
fine-tuning the mids for more buzz, grunge,
or somewhere in between. It also features a
three-way toggle switch in addition to the
standard tone control for tweaking highend response, letting the user dial in lots of
sting, or roll it back for a mellower response.
The Earthbound Audio Pale Mare is a sonic
playground for the fuzz-obsessed.
ToneReport.com
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