Jacques FB-2 Fuse Blower Distortion Pedal

This pedal is good.  Alot of distortion pedals seem to just produce, well distortion. This one produces great distortion, but allows all of your notes to come through, even with fuzz all the way up. You could play regular chords and they sound clear yet gritty. Great crunchy tone. The "blow" knobs act as you low, mid, high, and do a bit more as well. With the right tweeking, you can get a good variety of sound out of it.

Most manufacturers make their pedals idiot-proof by limiting sonic possibilities and appealing to the lowest common denominator. Not so with the FB2. There are six knobs, and they are all important. Three are the usual volume, tone (sweetly voiced) and amount of distortion. The other three are actually volume levels for three discrete distortion engines voiced low, mid and high. (They are NOT simple EQ's.) So what you have is equivalent to three distortion pedals, each handling a different frequency range, running in parallel into a mini-mixer. It took me an hour to familiarize myself with the sheer range of sonic options and find "my" setting; and another couple of hours to fine tune it. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of great sounds; there is so much flexibility, you can even dial in some bad ones (so what?)

I've had one on my pedalboard now for almost two years, and it isn't about to be replaced. Not everyone understands this pedal. It uses germanium transistors. Because of that, it wants to be the first pedal in the chain, ahead of everything else even the wah. Believe me I tried it everywhere else. Try it elsewhere, you might not like it. Put it first, and it is absolutely wonderful. How about a distortion that you can tweak from fuzz to all out grind, and still hear each individual string's contribution when playing chords? Nothing gets lost in the mud. And when used in combination with phase, flang, chorus or vibe, look out! Again, just put it first in the pedal chain, and you should love the results.