Benson Germanium Fuzz Demo and Review

Video Transcript

Note: a machine made this, so it’s not perfect, but if you’re hearing impaired and have any questions about what we said, please feel free to ask us in the comments or send us an email with the form below. 

So, this is just not, it’s not just a normal fuzz pedals, not just a normal germanium fuzz pedal. There are a lot of interesting things going on that I’m going to tell you about before I start playing. So you might notice there’s no tone knob on this fuzz pedal, but there is an impedance knob and there’s a volume knob and there’s a game numb.

So let’s start with the volume and gain. Those are pretty self-explanatory how loud, how fuzzy, how dirty, how nasty the impedance is. Interesting though. So a lot of guitars have noted throughout the years that if you roll back the volume on your guitar, It very much changes the characteristics of the fuzz pedals when you’re playing a fuzz pedal, basically people say things like it cleans up nicely.

It turns into a really nice overdrive stuff like that. But that’s just like every fuss. So what they’ve done here is this impedance knob. And let me read it. I have the, well, they have to say about it right here. The low impedance of the classic two transistor germanium fuzz circuit is both a blessing and a curse, a blessing because it can yield us tight, sparkly, clean tone when the guitar volume is rolled down and a curse because it sounds nasty in a bad way.

The, if there are buffers before in a signal chain, we want to some extremes to keep the blessing and lose the curse. And they’ve done that a couple of times in this pedal they installed a class, a buffer, and the very input of the germanium fuzz. This buffer feeds a pickup simulator circuit.

Another cool feature is even when people say stuff like, Oh, you should keep your germanium fuzz in the refrigerator or freezer or something to, because it’s very susceptible to temperature changes, and this is true. So what have they done for this? It’s it’s called bias. It’s internal Though you should not be adjusting anything.

There’s an internal tremor in there, but do not turn it, it will void your warranty, but basically it makes sure that the pedal. Stays at the desired internal temperature to get consistent sound. And that consistency is really key. If you want to use this pedal a lot, so let’s turn it on and you’ll see that it just went from orange to green.

Orange meant that it was still warming up and it will probably go orange degree in a couple of times.

I do love that way on the bar. All right. Gain basically all the way down and Pete ins down volume up on middle

So you see it’s orange, it’s working, it’s working to get up to that temperature at one.

All right. And we’re going to crank the game.

all right now, let’s start rolling. Look, I want to turn this back to about noon and we can start rolling up the impedance.

That sounds more like an overdrive at that point. That’s pretty neat.

let’s try that on the bridge pick up of the

Let’s try what they recommend as a clean boost setting and see how it drives the Iridium.

definitely made it louder. I wouldn’t say it really drove the Iridium, but your pedal will come with these settings. I want to go through some of them. So I did the overdrive. I did the clean booze. Let’s look at the bright phys impedance at noon.

sometimes I don’t live in why I do that.

That’s a dark fun

to a bright funds just by adjusting that in peanut snob. So yeah,

let’s look at the distortion setting. They have

I’m having fun with those. I really liked this pedal a lot. I think we’ve kind of done sort of the full-on sort of sound, but this is one of the.

well that as you can see my temperature, my offices, it’s kind of cold in here. But you have seen that working to maintain the consistency. What I think what impresses me the most about this pedal is that I feel like Chris Benson and his team really. Stop to think about what are some of the problems associated with germanium, fuzzes, and they really then work to fix them.

They know that people like to roll back their volume on that guitar to clean up their fuzzes and that it doesn’t always play nice. So they figured out a way to fix that. They know that temperature conditions can completely change the sound and just how, how germanium reacts inside of a pedal. So they fixed that.

And they created a fuzz that I think sounds really, really good. I’ve actually had, I’ve had this fuss for a few months now. So I’ve played with it quite a bit. It’s just, it’s stellar. It’s a really cool fuzz enormous props to Chris and his team for, for what they created here. And big, thanks to Mazda Stroh for, for sending this to me to demo.

So check it out. If you like the, and you like the quality of the Benson preamp, I think you’re really gonna, gonna dig this. And of course it’s pretty handsome looking. So please like comment, subscribe below check out our Patrion for really looks at videos. Not including ones that are kept under embargo.

So. You saw this along with the rest of the patrons. We have merchant get also podcast.com/shop patrion.com/get offsets. Please use a suite consider using the reverb.com and Sweetwater affiliate links in the video description that really helps out. And please, if you put music on the internet, please, please, please consider using distro kid.

You can say 7% on your first year of DistroKid. If you use the link in the video description. Until next time. Thanks for watching. Thanks for understanding. My name is Emily.