Electro-Harmonix Graphic Fuzz

It's so versatile it takes awhile to get the hang of it

Amazing, best distortion i've ever heard, and by FAR the most versatile distortion box i've heard. The guy who posted before me is a moron. Just think about it....a fuzz pedal that you can EQ and shape as much as you want! some of the most bizzare distortions can be dialed in, great box. It really lets the amp breath as well

this thing is like a rock

I play indie and hard rock, and this is an irreplaceable part of my sound, I don't know what i'd do without it

I just bought it and messed around with it. Very simple and strait forward pedal for anyone with a brain.

I tried this pedal out with a marshall jcm-800 head through marshall 412 cab first, guitar was a Gibson SG. My first thought was, why are they calling this a fuzz pedal? It's not so much an independant fuzz or overdrive as it is a signal booster. This is a good and bad thing.
It will not dramaticaly change the tone of an amp...the flavor of the amp is still present...I expected more out of this box. It really doesn't do that much, but I like the little things it does do, so i'm keeping it.

Just bought it

nothing

I play experimental music. It's good for feedback, and for a few weird tones. I don't like how the volume control on the pedal takes over the overall amp volume...in essense, this pedal takes over your eq and volume, and becomes your amp controls. If I lost it or it was stolen, I would be out some cash. Probably would just buy something else, but I'm keeping it, and I like it for now.

Well it's not the easiest pedal to use, but i eventually got the hang of it. It's got ten sliders, and a switch at the top that cuts the distortion on or off. it took me a couple of hours to get the sound i wanted, but it was worth it.

my setup is Fender strats-Graphic Fuzz- Boss Distortion- EH electric Mistress and a fender chorus amp. This is my fourth distortion pedal, and it's the best one i've heard so far. while i was tweeking it, i discovered every distortion sound from light overdrive to a heavy metal sound.

very realiable, but just in case if i'm wrong i have 3 other distortions.

The first one i got was busted, but i sent it back and got a new one.
(I ordered it from musictoyz.com, never delt with the actual company that made it.)
I sent in the warrenty card, but i hope i won't need to send it back for fixing.
Big thanks to musictoyz.com for their prompt and friendly return service!

I play in a sludge rock band, and it's perfect for my sound, and any other sound. Electro Harmonix really knows what they are doing.

Awesome. You've got sliders all over the place that EQ your tone, adjust your volume, deal with envelope filter issues, and control distortion. I got this in a poker game in college, so I never saw the manual. I'm sure you can figure it out. It took me a while to understand the envelope filter circuit though -- basically it increases the amount of fuzz added the the signal based on how hard you play. Really cool, especially if you have a lot of loud/soft sorts of songs.

My set-up is insane right now. I play a Fender Jaguar and a Yamaha Pacifica 12-string and I run them through the following - Boss compression/sustainer, Boss super chorus, Boss phaser, the graphic fuzz, a Tube Works realtube overdrive, a Boss Heavy Metal pedal, a Crybaby, an Ibanez analog delay, and an alesis miniverb rack. All that winds up inside the jangly goodness of a Roland JC-120. So is the Graphic Fuzz noisy? I don't know, maybe. I've got so many effects in my chain that my signal is a bit hissy, but nothing serious. The fuzz sounds great all the time. It's my main pedal. I use the other distortions and overdrives to kick the signal a bit, but I really like the subtlety the Fuzz gives you. I leave the distortion slider all the way down and that gives you a really warm rich tone. My band, The Jealous Type (www.thejealoustype.com) has songs that range from sounding like My Bloody Valentine to Juno to And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead. I use the fuzz on every single song. It's the best I've come across. I hate to sound like a gushing idiot over this, but seriously, when I broke this thing and sent it off to be repaired (see below) my band couldn't even practice. We sounded like shit. No other pedal I've ever played allows you to flow so smoothly from clean quiet sounds to loud nasty sounds.

Well, this thing has taken a beating. I've broken the footswitch and every single slider in the years I've had this. I've always been able to fix it though. I gig with it all the time though, and it's never burned me yet. Still, it has definately gone in and out during practices. Be warned, or else treat it better than I do.

Never dealt with the company. I did send it off to Canada to get it repaired once though, and the guy who did that obtained some parts from Electro Harmonix. So . . .

This pedal rules. I've been playing through it for about 6 years now and if it were stolen I'd stalk the son of a bitch who took it to the ends of the earth to get it back. The envelope filter feature of this pedal is the coolest thing. It allows for all kinds of distortion swells and stuff -- throw some reverb after it and you'll be sounding like Slowdive in no time. Stick a more intense distortion after it and kick them both on for incredible walls of noise. Single notes ring out with clarity, and chords hang together with excellent coherence. I don't really do solos or shred-metal stuff, so I can't really speak to that, but I've used this pedal in bands ranging from stright-up shoegazer noise to Fugazi-ish post-punk and it's never let me down.

Oh baby... This thing is full of usefull sounds. And getting them is stupidly easy too... the controls consist of 10 sliders, an on/off stomp switch, and a small switch on the back that turns off the fuzz circuit if you want to use the unit as a straight graphic EQ. The sliders are arranged into 4 "banks", for lack of better terminology. The first slider is the overall distortion level. Next, there are two sliders that effect the envelope of the signal passing throught the effect. The first is to increase the dynamics of your playing, while the second actually seems to cut the sustain (weird for a fuzz, eh??). You then have 6 band graphic eq section along with a master out. It only gets a 9 cuz it takes a wall wart (a wierd one at that... 24 VAC).

The unit is probably the most quiet that EH ever made... but I haven't heard a 16 second delay yet. No discernable noise when on... at least for a fuzz. Furthermore, I've been told the unit uses FET switching, which again is unusal for old EH pedals. The fuzz circuit is estatically nice to play with. It doesn't have the low end rumble of the big muff. However, the distortion is very smooth with alot of harmonics floating around in it. Coupled with the graphic EQ, you can squeeze many different flavours out of it. I've gotten this puppy to sound from the Stooges to My Bloody Valentine... along with other fuzz dreams. The really cool part of this pedal, tho, is the envelope control. Boosting the dynamics of your playing is really wierd... I'm used to cutting the dynamics with a compressor (I guess that it's an expander circuit in there). Anyhow, when you have the dynamic slider cranked and hit a chord hard, look out!! Your volume (but not distortion level, thankfully) almost doubles that which you'd expect. By doing this and cutting the sustain, you can create some very backwards sounding stuff... a la the Attack/Decay or a Slow Gear (which I can't really say... I've never heard either of these units).

Um.. not as reliable as others cuz I have no idea what chips this thing uses and whether they're replaceable. However, the steel enclosure is pretty solid.

Mike Mathews went out of business in the early 80s, so I guess that I'm on my own if I need help with this thing.

Well.. If I ever see one again, I'll probably scoop it. Especially if it's for under $100 dollars. Gotta love pawn shops that don't know what they're doing!! I'm not going to hold my breath though... this pedal came out at the end of EHs wierd life o' pedals, and thus only a few hundred were made (or so I'm told). Since I got this thing, it's become an intregal part of my setup. It's so dammed easy to make music with it. I was going to dump my BigMuff reissue and Boss OD-1... until I tried running all of them in parallel... whew!! The Graphic Fuzzes wierdness, BigMuffs big bottom, and OD-1s smoothness equated to one big distorted bliss.