Fuzz pedals have a humorous behavior of sounding sensible on their very own and falling aside the second you place them close to the remainder of your board. Stick a buffer in entrance of a vintage-style germanium fuzz and it could possibly go from creamy to skinny and spitty very quickly. So when Mad Professor say they’ve constructed a germanium fuzz designed to play properly with all the pieces else, it peaks an curiosity! 

The Milestone is impressed by classic mixing consoles, which is a pleasant nod to the place fuzz started. The sound is famously traced again to a defective console channel on a Nashville session in 1960, and this pedal units out to reimagine these earliest fuzz tones for contemporary gamers. It’s handwired in Finland, which you’ll really feel within the construct, and it comes with true bypass and a restricted lifetime guarantee.

The management structure is refreshingly easy: Quantity, Fuzz, Bass and Treble. The Bass and Treble knobs are the true story. Most germanium fuzzes provide you with a single voice and go away you to work round it. Right here you get a two-band EQ that permits you to form the fuzz to fit your guitar and amp. A small trim to the Treble was all it took to tame the highest finish with out dropping the chunk. Pull the Bass again and it tightens up properly for rhythm work. Push it up and also you get one thing fatter and extra classic.

Sound-wise, it is a actually satisfying fuzz. It’s dynamic and contact delicate, so it responds to how onerous you dig in and to your guitar’s quantity knob. Again it off and it cleans up nicely, leaving a gritty, woolly chime. Dig in and it opens up right into a wealthy, harmonically dense fuzz that sustains superbly.

The place the Milestone actually earns its maintain is alongside different pedals. There’s a transformer circuit in there, which suggests it could possibly sit after buffers or different pedals with out dropping its character or contact sensitivity. That’s an enormous deal, and it modified how I approached the session. I ran it with a drive and a compressor, and it dealt with each mixture I threw at it. With a lift in entrance, it pushed into a much bigger, extra aggressive lead tone. After a compressor, it evened out the dynamics with out flattening the texture. And with the order flipped, it nonetheless behaved. When you’re a pedalboard tinkerer, that is the fuzz that permits you to experiment with unconventional pedal order with out worrying about it falling aside. It’s additionally pitched as bass-friendly, because of that versatile EQ.

On the sensible facet, it runs on 9V DC solely with a really low present draw of about 8mA, so it received’t tax your energy provide. There’s reverse polarity safety, and it makes use of a normal 2.1mm centre-negative plug. There’s no battery choice, so ensure you’ve obtained an influence provide prepared.

The worth is €330, which isn’t low-cost, but it surely’s in keeping with different boutique handwired germanium fuzzes. Given the construct high quality, the transformer circuit and the EQ, I feel it’s honest.

Verdict

I believed this was a fantastic fuzz pedal. It will get the classic germanium character proper, the tone shaping is genuinely helpful, and it really works with different pedals in a manner most germanium fuzzes merely can’t. When you’ve ever been annoyed by a fuzz that solely works in a single spot in your board, the Milestone is nicely value a glance.

Click on HERE for extra info at Mad Professor’s web site.