Rock and roll would not exist without the electric guitar. However, to state the obvious, just because the name electric is in the instrument, does not mean that there isn’t a wide variety of tonal uniqueness to each era and player. Unlike a synth where a patch sounds like a patch regardless of who is playing it, two players with the same guitar and amp can still get a very different tone. However, when you start adding certain effects, while the tonal difference in players can still be evident, it’s pretty easy to figure out what’s in their signal chain. While some pedals and sounds can be tied to a decade like the Rockman, a few seem to transcend time and genre, and one of those is the Electro-Harmonix Big Muff Pi, or simply the Big Muff and all its variations (including the Soviet version).
The original Big Muff was released in 1969. It was cheap, it was reliable, and it had a very distinctive and huge fuzz sound. It is still cheap, it is reliable, and still has a very distinctive and huge fuzz sound. It’s changed and had different versions throughout the years with slight frequency changes for specific genres, but it never lost its fuzzy soul.
Jimmy Hendrix was one of the first users, with rumors being he got it before it was released as a fuzzy beta tester and his album releases tend to support that. Guitar gods of the 70's such as David Gilmour and Carlos Santana (we’ll forgive him for Smooth) joined in. Its usage, while ebbing a bit during the yacht rock early 80’s, continued through that decade, but soared once again when Seattle band Mudhoney basically defined what grunge would become with their album, Superfuzz Bigmuff, that was named after the pedal.
With Mudhoney being the big inspiration to Nirvana and other Seattle bands like Soundgarden who made that sound definitive, it can be found all over Smashing Pumpkins, Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr. or really any band that you associate with grunge and even non grunge rock like Lenny Kravitz before things kind of went off the rails later in the decade (Aside, it’s wild that the decade was bookended with Smells Like Teen Spirit on one side and Nookie on the other. Nookie came out when I moved from Seattle to LA for school, so maybe me living in Seattle was keeping it all together, apologies…).
It can still be heard in songs throughout this century by the Foo Fighters, Wolfmother, Muse, Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Black Keys, and we could go on and on.
Very few pedals have a sound that lasted over fifty years, making this truly an icon of rock. Only thing left to do is crank up our Big Muff playlist.
Jimmy Hendrix - Foxy Lady
Thin Lizzy - Whiskey In The Jar
Pink Floyd - Sorrow
Mudhoney - Mudride
Nirvana - Lithium
Soundgarden - Outshined
Lenny Kravitz - Are You Gonna Go My Way
Smashing Pumpkins - Mayonaise
Muse - Bliss
Wolfmother - Mother
