Today we are introducing the Glaive: an octave fuzz with a distinctive voice and the potential for dangerous levels of gain. It’s available now on our website and through our retailers around the world.
The Glaive is a modernist approach to octave fuzz. At its core, it solidly occupies a niche at the intersection of fuzz and distortion, with a precise tactile feel under your picking hand. With the texture control, you can explore a spectrum from ripping high gain to scrambled intermodulation. By using op amps operating at high voltage, it is shockingly dynamic for how much gain is present, and it is capable of a huge bandwidth of overtones and sub-octave artifacts that are otherwise masked by typical octave fuzz circuits. Even if you ignore the more gnarly elements, it is also a shockingly good high-gain distortion.
If you want to learn more about the sounds and features, our technical demo can be found below, and our manual can be found here.
If dangerous octave fuzz sounds familiar to you, it’s because this is a reworking of our 0xEAE Fuzz, which met its untimely demise earlier this year. The 0xEAE line was never intended to be scaled up (they’re incredibly labor-intensive), so we never made enough of them, which in turn meant we were never able to talk about it much without seeming disingenuous.
In addition, fuzz was always a sort of gap in our lineup: prior releases have been either collaborative (Eldritch Blast) or riffs on existing material (Percolator half of the Dude Incredible). The 0xEAE Fuzz was the one that felt most true to our style, and it quickly became a key fixture on my personal pedalboard—check the intro of this song for a prime example. Because of this, we felt it deserving of a fresh presentation and wider availability.
The Glaive fits in our existing lineup with a smaller form factor and fresh graphics thanks to the ever-excellent Bryan Aiken. (The art prompt I gave him was “A shardblade for Champion Gundyr” – real ones know.)
Furthermore, we were able to add a few new features. First is the LPF toggle, for taming (or unleashing) the overall high frequency response. Second is the Squelch toggle: operating somewhere between a gate and a bias shift, it produces an extremely tight noise gate and a touch-sensitive, broken note decay. To round it out, we updated our switching system to feature intelligent momentary/latching bypass, for quick stabs of intense fuzz on demand.
Anyway, we are excited to finally have this circuit back in the world. We’re already hard at work on the next cool thing, so thanks for sticking with us and supporting what we do.
Cheers,
John & co.
PS and some ephemera: A Glaive was the choice weapon for my D&D character in a 6 year campaign that just wrapped. A half-orc sea captain who originally learned how to fight with a harpoon, he killed 3 dragons by the end, one of them in a wild 1v1 match. Best game ever.