Acetone Fuzzmaster

First of all this is *fun* to use, and it's easy to get whacked fuzz/distortion tones out of this, _but_...
The volume & fuzz adjust knobs are on the back of the unit, and would be tough to adjust on the fly on a gig. Also the labels for the two switches on the top are tiny, and would be tough to read on stage. Used on a desktop, however, these complaints don't matter.
Also, no adapter power, 9V battery only, another downside.
Top has effect/bypass switch and tone selector switch, back has input and output jacks, and fuzz adj. pot & volume/off switch pot.
Mine is the Fuzz Master FM-2 Professional. I've also seen FM-1 and FM-3 models

Using this with a modified Epi Crestwood & Tube Works Real Tube II preamp, ART SLA1 power amp, Celestion greenbacks.
Various combinations of the tone switch, volume & fuzz adj pots give a wide range of sounds. It can sound like your speakers are ripped to shreds, a swarm of angry bees, metal chords, bizzarre harmonics. Add a compressor, and everything changes. Put a flanger in front of it, and it tracks weird - hits strange unexpected notes.
It has a wee bit of hiss - nothing compared to the volume coming out of it, and at night it picks up Russian? radio bouncing off the ionesphere. I don't care, I love it and still give it a ten.

Jeez, this thing is prolly from the early 70's and it still works great. I expect it will continue to work for a long time to come. The components are solid, quality items, the metal box is heavy and sturdy. Don't drop it on your foot.

Made by Ace Electronic Industries of Japan, makers of Rhythm Ace drum machines and Ace Tone organs. Ikutaro Kakehashi left the company in '72 to start Roland/Boss. I think Ace was owned by Sakata Shokai, manufacturers of the Oberheim Matrix 6, for a while. You tell me who to send it to if it breaks. >8^)

I admit to a pedal jones. I've got plenty of distortions, overdrives, fuzzes. But this one is the balls. If you like to make rude noises with attitude, you'll prolly like this box. If you want to sound like <insert favorite deceased or hip young guitar god here>, keep looking, cause this won't help you sound like any one of those sissies. This fuzz box has an attitude problem. It wants to kill your speakers, and it says rude things about your sister. If it fell on any other fuzz pedal, it would crush it. Other fuzz pedals are for people who want woman tone, sissie tone, and nancy-boy tone. This is the Fuzz _Master_.

Manual? HAHAHAHAHAHA firmware? HAHAHAHAHA
Like stated before, VOLUME with ON switch, and the other knob syas FUZZ ADJ. I dont realy know if its a tone knob or some kinda gain control, no clue. Also included a NORMAL-FUZZ switch and TONE SELECTOR switch. give it about a half hour and you will be able to work something out of it

My basses
Musicman/jazz 5string copy, 5string frettless jazz copy, maxitone archtop.
My amps
fender bassman 100 & bassman 135
my cabinets
Bag end 1x15 (beast) Ashdown 2x10

I run into the normal channel of the amp with my bass and plug beside it into the input on the pedal then out of the pedal into my PEAVY bass FEX (digital rack unit) I only use the peavy for its envelope filter with many adjustments and the decent delay. I use the fuzz master as a squarewave generator. I totally agree with every tone statement made before me. I can tear through my basement walls if I crank up loud enough. The one tone setting has a scooped mids sound and the other one is just the opposite. I dont have any clue what the fuzz adjust it for but I turn it and its a slight variation on the effect. I use it to sometimes overdrive the processor and volume on max has thit great short sustain. You hold the note, and it just dies out its pretty trippy...now add an envelope filter and delay and you travel the universe. ITS SO MUCH FUN by itself I have been able to get a simmilar sound of Jimi Page on the end of Fool in the rain.

must say the effect is really sensitive to dynamics... if you crank out bass with all series pickups go nutz with a pick or really dig in the fuzz master delivers

tone sugesstion: let the battery run down some time...man it gets insane it dropps out on random.

looks well built, and the battery door is great...the whole thing swings open with the twist of two screws. no problems yet

I give it a 7 because its not really versital but every tone smith needs on in thier arsenal
Its makes a great element in bass synth. with other distrotions and a decent envelope filter its great. I have been playing for about 5 years and tone is my driving force. I with this pedal I have taken myself to new places.

if you cant figure out how to use this pedal then you should probably not bother reading this...

by all means this is my favorite hidden trick in my bag of goodies...ive never inmy life heard a pedal this odd....it actually makes a bass sound like satan speaking in tounges if you crank the 50hz on yer e.q. and maybe trim up the super highs (the noise just cuts through any thing..cymbals,snares,anything...it sounds like the lower setting has a mild lower octave added to it or some kind of strange square wave..i dont really know..alls i know is that when you play it through and ampo for the first time you just want to smile at the godzilla sized burp that just ripped your mind in half

never broken in three or four yrs or whatever...it looks older than dirt...probably predates dinosaurs and capitalism

umm...seeing as how this pedal is in fact older than civilzation as well as the fact that aliens probably made it ive never bothered with customer support.

i use this thing mostly for slowww sloww bass parts that need an extra kick in the ass as well as the occaisional guitar lead since the tinny side of the pedal is really really painful at high volume... it also works surprisingly well for some fast stuff here and there..but its so damn muddy that trying to use anything but single note lines and occaisional power chords leads to a pile of rumbling earthshaking static poo...kinda like very very very very large am radio imploding from a nuclearmelt down in the middle of summer in florida....

It is easy to use! I give it a 10!

The previous reviewer was neither insincere nor hyperbolic. Do you have the sweetest sounding AC-30 ever to roll out of merry old England? I do, and this pedal will make it sound like like its power tubes have been used to sodomize a baboon and its capacitors have been soaking in the narcotic-ridden vomit of Miles Davis since right after he recorded Jack Johnson. It is just horrible, and even better through a tweed champ. Looking inside, it's unbelievable that so few parts and such a simple circuit can rape a guitar signal with such severity.

The two tone settings are more or less as described below, although I find the first setting to focus on an absurd kind of midrange more than low end wallop. It gives all strings at all frets the same kind of weight. The second setting sounds like bugs... bugs from outer space! The pedal is fairly noiseless, and doesn't seem to add gobs of gain or sustain so much as twist your signal into something the inventors of the guitar weren't really thinking about. There are no tight lows, sweet mids or chimey highs to be found on either setting, and this pedal is inappropriate for all styles of music.

Can I get the sound of my favourite artists? Let me say that after buying this pedal I recorded the greatest guitar solo I have ever heard, although I can't really tell what notes I played, and that my favourite artist is now me. This question is therefore answered, and decisively, with the word "yes!"

It worked for about half a year (at least I assume it was working, and meant to sound like that) and then stopped working. I haven't gotten it fixed yet, but my hopes are high.

n/a

I play some sort of pop music, but no matter what you play you probably wouldn't leave this on much. It definitely won't replace a Tube Screamer, Rat or Big Muff in anyone's setup. Still, I can imagine it making extra-special guest appearances in anything from Portishead to Butthole Surfers-style music. It sounds like nothing else, and yet now defines the term "fuzz pedal" where I am concerned. I am eagerly awaiting its return to working order.

Nothing too tough - one knob for drive, one for volume (also an on/off switch on the knob - don't ask me why), and two switches. The one on the right is your bypass, and the one on the left selects which type of fuzz you want. This is another one of those if you like the sound it makes you'll have no trouble getting an easy sound out of it, and if you don't, you won't type things, I think, but it's more versatile than a lot of the other pedals I use.

It's me and the Hag III into the 30w Musicaman or the Squier P into the Bassman compact, and both are winners this time around. At least for the most part. I've also heard it played through an Orange head with wah and delay and all like that, and that's a good sound too, but it's not me playing, so I won't get into that so much.

This pedal rules. It really does. Those two fuzz settings I mentioned work like this: The first, more straightforward one is actually the bigger, louder sound. Very bassy, extreme fuzz, excellent for power chords or for the bass. It's pretty noisy when you move much past two or three strings, or really dissonant chords, but it's a huge sound. Very angry, but sort of a dull, undirected anger - like a general disgust for the world. When we bought this, the guy said "yeah, if you like a the crunch in your music, this good," and we sort of made fun of him afterward, but he was dead on right. This thing sounds like 8 or 10 stacks of various makes and ages all blasting as absolute loud as they'll go. Speaker ripping terror. I wouldn't even call it fuzz exactly. Put a bass through it and you get about twice as much bottom end as you normally would, with a really excellent clippy buzz/overdrive sound. It gets a little muddy, and chords are kind of tough to pull off, but single note lines sound just huge and dirty and scuzzy and ill-tempered. This pedal doesn't shave very often and smokes a lot and likes really cheap whiskey and has no compunctions about cursing, spitting, or grabbing itself in front of your mother. This pedal never wears a helmet and hasn't washed its jeans in weeks, if not months.

The second setting is just weird, but equally cool. The bass drops out, and I assume that's all they meant to happen, but this weird harmonic/ring modulator sound starts coming in, and sometimes it will start playing two notes at once (no real idea what realtion the notes ever have to each other) or overtones to the note you want, or just some other sound that seems vaguely related to what you're playing, but definitely isn't what you had intended. It does the same thing on bass or guitar, too, which is a plus. Play chords in the lower register, and to the degree I've ever been able to predict anything this pedal will do, it just sounds awful. In the awesomest way I can describe. Thin, ugly, focused malice. Brittle, scratchy do much scraping and harshness you can barely pay attention to the notes being played. Amp-on-the-edge-of-cutting-out blasts of white noise terror. And it does not get along well with other pedals. Pretty much aything I've ever added or seen added to the chain just makes it louder, surlier, and less predictable, as does monkeying around with the volume on your guitar. This is the ugliest pedal I've ever run across, with the exception of the 3ms Noise Swash, which I've only heard the samples of off their website. It's not that extreme, but it's definitely able to produce jaw-dropping levels of harshness, and not a whole lot else. Pristine is the least appropriate word I can imagine being used to describe it.

It's old. I don't even know how old, and it's pretty beat up. The on/off switch is getting kind of fried, but it's the same type as comes in any MXR pedal, and wouldn't be hard to replace, and I would feel pretty confident toting it around. It's got a pretty heavy casing (it looks like a cb radio), and there's really honestly not that much inside to fall apart, so even though it's broken right now, I'm giving it pretty good marks.

Not an issue at this point. Fix it yourself. I think Roland may somehow be involved in the history of this pedal, but I'm not positive about that. Just spring for a soldering iron or make a friend who has one and bribe him with beer.

At 5 bucks, It would have to sound pretty bad to make me hate it, and the thing is, it does sound pretty damn bad, but I would never complain about it. On a pure obnoxiousness level, there's very little that I've ever seen able to top it. On the other hand, you probably won't enjoy it unless you're using it to make music as appalling as its tone, and sometimes I'm not in the mood for that, so it's not an everyday type effect, at least for me personally. But if you find one, and anything I've written intrigues you, you might as well go for it. Just have something more agreeable in the arsenal too, because this one can't be bothered to comfort or soothe you or anyone you love.