Smallsound/Bigsound Poly-Grace

Smallsound/Bigsound

The smallsound/bigsound Poly-Grace is a mystery fuzz pedal with highly interactive controls that can create a variety of damaged sounds. Easily achievable “tame” fuzz tones give way to unpredictable sonic behaivior with the flick of a switch or the twist of a knob: heavy psych bass fuzz tones, shoegaze textures, volume swells, octave jumping, weird gurgles and buzzsaw sustain…

For the technically-minded, the Poly-Grace is an interesting pedal; it contains a bypass-able transistor fuzz section, a unique IC fuzz section as the heart of the circuit and a push-pull output stage with selectable voltage – making it a mini-amplifier in itself that will power a speaker! Plug it into a 4 or 8 ohm speaker cab for amplification from speaking to shouting volume suitable for studio recording or just playing at home. The circuit reacts slightly differently whether being used as a speaker driver or as a pedal… so experiment!

The original idea behind the Poly-Grace was to build a small run of pedals which could be used by anyone – non-musicians alike. I looked in the direction of the super fun Cracklebox (designed by Michael Waisvisz and built by Steim) for inspiration and though the end result will have little value to the non-musician… this is the result of those explorations.

This is a very limited run of 20 being offered as a pre-order package for the upcoming Cymbals Eat Guitars (my band) release of Lenses Alien from Barsuk Records (USA) and Memphis Industries (UK).