Wednesday, May 25, 2011

New Videos of Black Cat Pedals

There have been a bunch of new Black Cat demo videos posted on YouTube recently. First of all, we made a couple of "Quick & Dirty" demos of the two newest Black Cat products, the Black Cat Mini Trem and Black Cat Bee Buzz. These are posted on the Black Cat Pedals YouTube channel, but you can just watch them here:

The guys at Jet City Music also made an awesome video of the Bee Buzz and Mini Trem together, which you can see below:


Finally, Jonathan Moody made this nice demo of the Mini Trem on bass:


So there you go. That's almost a whole lunch break's worth of entertainment right there. Enjoy!

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Ninja Fuzz Face

It's been a while since we posted anything, so we're due for an update. There's no shortage of things to report, that's for sure. Here's one I've been meaning to post for a while. I call it the Ninja Fuzz Face.

A few months back we got a request at the FMO Gear Shop from Vincent to make a replica silicon version vintage Dallas-Arbiter Fuzz Face. Vincent really wanted to use a round Fuzz Face housing, and I happened to have an empty Dunlop JD-F2 enclosure that I was saving for some future rainy day project.

The funny thing about that enclosure is that the rubber tread has no "smiley" graphic like the originals did — I always hated that, and I though it looked pretty stupid on with the red finish Dunlop used. But when we painted it black and added some black knobs, it turned out to be pretty slick looking. This stealth black Ninja Fuzz Face definitely means business.

The inside is even more impressive. Greg had some of the phenolic material that was actually used to make the original Fuzz Face boards in the sixties. Then he populated the board with NOS 1/2 watt carbon comp resistors, period correct Philips capacitors, and a pair of BC108 transistors. Of course, the addition of the bias trimpot deviates from the original design, but is incredibly useful for fine-tuning the fuzz tone. We should have registered this Ninja Fuzz Face as a lethal weapon — it's a Killer!