Electro-Harmonix Releases Highly Versatile and Textural Ripped Speaker Fuzz

After a couple of complex pedal reviews - it’s nice to get back to basics with another new fuzz confection. Like most of my favourite fuzzes - this EHX Ripped Speaker Fuzz features an external Bias knob - which controls the timbre and texture of those ripping fuzz sounds.

This goes everywhere from a sort of farty / brassy sounding fuzz, to a smooth gating voicing, and onto more jagged cut-up stuttery/sputtery sounds. It does the voltage starve / dying battery thing really well, and dead centre yields a fat and powerful kind of Hendrix Silicon Fuzz Face voicing. Sounds transistor based to me, really lovely guttural and textural sounds here. Real fuzz aficionados love this sort of thing, while for many of the mainstream this is everything they hate about fuzz in one box.

It also pairs that really smart RIP / Bias control with a cool Tilt-Shift EQ Tone Control - where CCW gives you More Lows and Less Highs, and CW gives you More Highs and Less Lows. I’m a big fan of Tilt-Shift EQ’s on fuzzes - the Catalinbread Giygas uses one such to great effect too.

This to me is everything that is great about fuzz - lots of tonal and textural variety through some really smart controls - for maximum impact - also works great with guitar volume-knob clean-up. You can totally choose to what degree you really annoy your neighbours here - I’m setting mine to Stun - that is when I get one in of course.

For me EXH seems to be on something of a roll at the moment. I’ve just picked up the new Nano Metal Muff, and this will be my very next EHX acquisition - priced at a similarly affordable level as the recent Nano (Compact) Metal Muff - or $99 which seems to work out as near enough the £ numerical value equivalent here in the UK at the moment.

I will definitely be getting an EHX Pitch Fork + and Mainframe Bitcrusher at some stage - while the Eddy Chorus/Vibrato with Envelope Filter is down as a nice-to-have. Mike Matthews and his team is definitely on a special sauce innovation run these days - and these are great products at a really decent pricing level. I’ve never really liked the default EXH knobs much - but I can certainly live with them!

How do you feel about the Ripped Speaker Fuzz - will you be getting one for yourselves?