This little monster blows my mind. The Fuzz Factory (FF) can be pretty ordinary or take you into the twilight zone. There's a million sounds in this green box and it can oscillate like crazy, which is great fun to play with. It's not a modeling pedal (as the name may suggest), all the effects you get out of it are very original indeed. You need to spend a while with it to figure out how each of the five controls (volume, gate, compression, drive and stability) interact but it's well worth the effort. And a lot of fun anyway. The first four knobs are pretty much self explanatory, stability, or 'stab', is where things get really weird. It has a profound effect on the tone of the fuzz, treble content is reduced as you turn the sucker down. It's modus operandi is not explained in the manual but I remember reading a post somewhere that said that it regulates voltage. I usually have the FF set to a sharp fuzz sound that's great for power chords and lead (volume at about 9:00, everything else around 2:00). It's just on the edge of breaking loose and has that velcro feel when the compression kicks in. I also use the 'octave fuzz' setting (gate between 2:00-3:00, comp and drive at 7:00 and stab all the way up). Here the pedal produces an overtone when I play above the 12th fret, especially with the neck pickup. Pretty often I just play around with the oscillation, twisting the knobs to change the pitch and tone. In accordance with Mr. Vex's recommendation this is the very first pedal in my signal chain, going even before the tuner. It uses very little power, and I can therefore safely run this one on batteries, which is welcome since I have 8 units to power and only 7 plugs on my daisy chain :).
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