The Katanasound Furious Man Multifaceted Fuzz is a pretty unique highly versatile 3 Silicon Transistor Fuzz

I think when I originally reported this pedal I somehow confused it with being a Superfuzz - which it assuredly is not. It contains 3 of those TO-92 style plastic case Transistors which have all been painted over so you can’t see what they are!

The pedal has 5 controls, all but one of which are conventional - but where the 5th ’Duty’ knob is somewhat unique - a sort of mix of a secondary Bias and Voltage / Starve control.

Controls - Volume, Bias, Fuzz, Duty (Character), Buff Kill : 0 / 1.

So volume, Bias and Fuzz are wholly self explanatory and fairly conventional - while the Buff Kill is some kind of Buffer / Impedance switch - it sounds best in the left / 0 option for me.

Finally the ’Duty’ knob is an interesting control which I think is some kind of Voltage control as it goes from starved, spitty and 8-bitty CCW through open and searing around the mid-way mark, and then you get a sort of smoothing compression, and stickiness and a degree of percolation as you wind it up to fully CW. ’Duty’ is highly interactive with the Fuzz Control - so you kind of use those together to set the saturation and character / timbre of the fuzz - works really well actually.

My current preferred settings are - Volume @ Max, Bias at Noon, Fuzz @ Max, and Duty @ Noon, with the Buff Kill switch to the left / 0.

It’s actually fun to run up and down the sweep of the Duty control and fine-tune how the Fuzz / Gain / Saturation interacts - there are so many different styles of fuzz here - it’s not as versatile as the ShiftLine Termofuzz - but it reminds me a little of that.

The Furious Man Fuzz is no longer listed on the main Katanasound website - so possibly discontinued? While I got mine from Andy Babiuk’s Fab Gear Store - actually the Reverb.com one! Where it still retails for $349. It was actually quite a pricey buy including the delivery and customs charges added for shipping to London - so probably not my most sensible decision - while in the aftermath of my A-Z of Japanese Boutique Pedal Builders - I wanted to tick off a couple or so of those recently featured on this site. And the only ones I could reasonably find were the ZenZero FuzU from earlier today, and this Katanasound Furious Man.

I’m hoping that my friend Henry Kaiser will give me an introduction to his good friend Toshihiko Tanabe - and in return for an article on the Tanabe.TV brand I might get some favourable terms on a Sunkudo and Zenkudo - and at a later stage the May Queen and Santanabe. I’ve certainly featured Tanabe pedals quite a few times on this site - it’s about time I picked some of those up!

The Katanasound Furious Man is a great little fuzz - mostly in classic sort of Fuzz Face territory but with some significant extension - and incredibly versatile, especially on the character and texture side. I’m definitely glad I got one of these in the collection before they sell out and / or are permanently gone as such. Weirdly mine has a low serial number of #0009 - I would have expected more to have been sold - possibly price and low availability makes this prohibitive?

As mentioned - the Furious Man Multifaceted Fuzz featured in my recent A-Z of Japanese Boutique Brands article - as below :