Effectrode, Mercury Fuzz

Description

This beautiful little pedal is built on a vintage, hand selected, space grade pencil tubeand N.O.S. germanium point-contact crystal diodes – there’s a lot of glass in this pedal! This combination of hot biased and cold-biased tube gain stages with crystal diode clipping circuitry blends thermionic (asymmetrical) and solid-state (symmetrical) distortions to generate beautiful fuzzed guitar tones. At full throttle this little pedal can generate outrageous ‘blocking-distortion’ which sounds like a tube amp being pushed beyond it’s limits. Rolling back the ‘Fuzz’ control creates an immense, bold fuzz tone with endless amounts of smooth liquid sustain that stretches notes into infinity. At lower fuzz settings the MERCURY cleans up to produce natural sounding (real!) tube dirt and overdrive with unprecedented clarity and string-to-string definition. It’s an incredibly simple, yet versatile pedal.

Subminiature (or pencil) tubes were developed during World War II for missile control and therefore had to be exceptionally tough devices. These tubes were manufactured to meet the stringent MIL-E-1 specification for reliability and designed for long service life under conditions of severe shock, vibration (20,000G!), high temperature and high altitude. The subminiature tubes represent the pinnacle of tube technology and offer more consistent musical performance than the early transistors. Effectrode is now utilising these little tubes for peaceful purposes – to create extremely compact and tough little effects pedals!