Whoa. I love this song and that tone. Cranking this on a sunny Saturday morning brings back memories of being a kid and waking up to my dad having this just cranked on his beloved McIntosh system and the house shaking as he danced around the kitchen making coffee and flapjacks for weekend breakfast.
Good memories.
What better way to start my Saturday morning than chasing this tone dragon, right?
Fuzzes are notoriously hard to emulate. Each one is a unique snowflake. The tiniest changes in components, variance and circuit topolgies can create huge differences in how they feel to play and how they sound.
Copping something close to this tone was a real capital-j
Journey. I'll try and bring you along with some of my notes.
I rolled through a few fuzz models and tried to mutate some of them using the bias settings and clipping settings in the block. Nothing really gave me that almost mono-only quality that you hear on the track. He's getting this drop out in the tone when he brushes more than a single string that really gives it a bunch of character and, if you're playing a pedal that does this, makes playing it a real experience.
The Octave Distortion was doing something kind of like that -- where you get it to almost fart out when you play more than one string at a time. So I played with that for a bit and wasn't happy with the overall tone. It was missing something. There's a horn-like quality you hear in the track that reminds of a Jordan Bosstone pedal. But it's not a Bosstone tone. It's...something else.
I tried combining the Octave Distortion in parallel with a Bender Fuzz. The Bender is a super squirrely circuit that does ripping quality tones really well. I thought I'd hit upon a passable facsimile with the paralell approach here and was about to record my sample clip when I stopped and decided to look through my stash of DIY fuzz pedals.
And there it was.
Staring right back at me on the very top of my home for wayward pedals (aka the plastic rubbermaid bin).
Mark Hammer's Green Stinger pedal. A pedal he gifted me many years ago that I thought was quirky, but never really made much music with. I was using it like QOTSA use it in Little Sister -- as an octave up on a solo sound. Piercing. Quirky. But not that flutey, synthy thing.
The Stinger wasn't the sound here. But it was the right idea.
A ring oscillator is fanastic in a fuzz pedal. It turns it into something barely controllable and accentuates mid-frequencies. We don't have a fuzz model in the drive block that includes an oscillator component to the circuit you can control. But we do have a ring oscillator block!
I dropped an oscillator in front the drive block running the Bender model and....
...nope.
What was I missing???
TRACKING!
Fuzz osciallators track the frequency of the input signal. Poorly. Which is what makes them do silly things when you play more than one note at a time like fart out as they mistrack or jump between oscillating dominate frequencies in the signal.
I flipped the oscillator to frequency tracking mode and it was there!
I spent another 20 minutes tuning the frequency response of the fuzz and the osciallator content in the signal.
The end result isn't exactly Spirit in the Sky, but I don't think you'll ever get it precisely there without knowing exactly what fuzz he was using and what the circuit topology it was. It's not quite a flutey as his tone.
But this is Pretty Damn Close. And stupid amounts of fun to play.
I take no responsibility for the neighbours you're going to annoy when you crank this and jam along. Clip was made with my Silver Sky -- I don't own a single coil Telecaster.
The preset is on Axe-Change here and was made with the latest Cygnus public beta:
https://axechange.fractalaudio.com/detail.php?preset=8727
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