Buddy Blues celebrates his rapid rise to prominence with a cool OCE signature pedal collaboration -The Gentleman 2-Transistor Fuzz with Shapeable Dirty Boost

Beirut-born, now Orlando Florida based Buddy Ayache has experienced a rapid rise to prominence on the pedal demo scene. While he’s been a live performer with his ’Buddy Blues Band’ for many years more - he only got into doing demos around 4 years ago. I believe he has some association with Mas Distro - where he’s now a first choice demoer for many of those brands.

His live performance roots are evident within the musicality of his demos, and his new signature pedal is one of those rarities that comes with a tonne of practical applications.

Many signature pedals fall foul of being too specific for those artists - with those pedals kind of being deliberately ’on-rails’ and limited within their scope - with a narrower field of applications.

’The Gentleman’ though is a properly expansive pedal - using a secondary Dirty Boost - whose character you can shape with the ’Sweet’ control - to counteract the sometime low output profile of vintage style 2-transistor fuzzes.

There are a number of different ways you can upgrade the Fuzz Face circuit to give it a more expansive and controllable output - and ’The Gentleman’ is a really great take on that - it sounds fantastic!

Controls - Sweet (Character), Boost, Level, Boost Footswitch, Fuzz Footswitch.

Buddy’s collaboration partner OCE Pedals is best known to me for having those pedals with actual Hammers and Pliers riveted onto their facias (Hammer Heavy Fuzz and Lineman Distortion). The Gentleman is a very elegant looking pedal with a fantastic versatile shapeable output.

With just a single fuzz-side Master Level control - you would normally have to rely entirely on your guitar volume and tone controls - but with the Dirty Boost added here - you can offload a lot of that to the pedal - or mix it up as appropriate. Fuzz faces always have a lot of guitar volume gain cleanup - so it’s very common to have the volume and gain controls on those original pedals default cranked / dimed - and then just ride the guitar controls.

A lot of Fuzz Faces, particularly the vintage circuit types can tend to be a little underpowered on the volume side - you can invert the last 2 capacitors to counter that, or else apply an additional boost circuit - as is the case here - to augment the fuzz circuit’s output levels. Having a Dirty Boost - means that you’re adding a little more gain too - an all-round great solution for getting the most out of a 2-Transistor fuzz circuit. My only minor annoyance here is that the specific transistors used are not mentioned - it sounds rather more like BC183 ballpark though rather than BC108/9. So most likely a Type III Fuzz Face!

It’s a smart take on that genre for sure. I would have preferred it in a slightly more compact enclosure - but this one accommodates those larger knobs which are so attractive in this arrangement.

I already have way over a hundred Fuzz Faces in my reference collection - but I still kind of want this one too.

The Gentleman Fuzz and Boost is available for preorders currently on the OCE Pedals Webstore - where it goes for $219 / £180. I expect this one to do rather well. I will look to pick it up at some stage - while I still have the Silktone+ to get in - it will be neck-and-neck as to which of those 2 I go for next for this genre!