Pop Festival – Electric guitar pedal – Fuzz

Pop Festival fuzz comes from the electricity and psychedelic sounds from the late 60s; a historical period of extreme sound experimentation. Artists like Jimi Hendrix, The Who, Cream, Rolling Stones, Beatles, Santana, Ten Years After… were titans of international music consecrated by their tone: they totally revolutionized the guitar sound. Probably, without their contribution, music would not be the same today.

Let’s take advantage of the guitar controls!
The Pop Festival has 3 controls: Volume, Smash and Fuzz. The obtainable nuances from this pedal are truly innumerable, from a slight effervescence on the upper harmonics, to a square wave simulating the effect of an amplifier on the verge of destruction.
One of the big advantages of the best fuzzes of the past is the ability to drive distortion with the guitar controls: Pop Festival has this considerable feature. For best results, it is recommended to always place the Pop Festival at the beginning of the effects chain.

“To be completely honest, I’ve never been a big fan of Fuzz having grown up and trained in an era where this effect was not trendy. I began to appreciate this effect in 2003, with the release of ‘Seven Nation Army’ and Jack White’s guitar, from there, the Fuzz was rediscovered and also associated to 60s guitar heros, not only for its typical and wild tone, simplicity of use is very important. Fuzz needs to be used as the first pedal in the chain, immediately after the guitar, for a very simple reason: it should be considered as an extension of the controls on the guitar. A well-built Fuzz allows you to obtain brilliant clean tones even with Fuzz knob at maximum, simply by lowering the guitar volume, to gradually enter into increasingly pronounced distortion. This magic happens thanks to the interaction between the internal wiring of the guitar and Fuzz pedal circuitry. Born by mistake in the 50s, but that’s a whole different story.” – Luca Colombo

Between legend and myth…
This completely handcrafted fuzz, like all Colombo Audio Electronics products, was the result of a careful study of components and their interaction to obtain the sound that dictated rock history. The market was completely different in the 60s, and the technology wasn’t even comparable to the nowadays facilities. The big difficulties to recreate the sound of the old components was not easy to overcome. Pop Festival entrusts 2 silicon transistors with the fundamental role to generate this “ancient flavor” effect; the greatest challenge, is to make these silicon transistors sound like the old germanium ones, these components are difficult to find nowadays, and above all, the reliability is also very poor (variable sound with the change in temperature and humidity). Pop Festival is the perfect combination of vintage sound, great craftsmanship and reliability.

The controls
Pop Festival has got two classic Volume and Fuzz controls, essential to define the type of distortion/effect we are looking for, it also adds a Smash control, which works on the feedback resistor, simulating the effect of an amplifier in its last seconds of life.

• Fuzz: define the amount of distortion;
• Smash: simulates the effect of an amplifier on the brink of destruction, keep this control at minimum to obtain traditional Fuzz sounds, raise it to explore very particular territories, such as simulations with a bad brass flavor (trumpet, trombone, etc.)
• Volume: sets the output level.

Usage tips
The best way to use the Pop Festival in the old-fashioned way is to place the volume of your guitar at about halfway and place the Fuzz control where we get the best clean sound, place the Smash control at minimum and the Volume over halfway. Then, if we raise the volume of the guitar we will enter a very astonishing distortion territory.

If we instead want to delve into modern and particular tones, the best advice is to position the Smash control halfway and the Fuzz control based on the amount of distortion we want to obtain. We will then lower the Smash control to move towards a more traditional fuzz, we can instead decide to raise Smash further to risk extreme sounds.

“Good taste is the death of art” – Truman Capote