Horrothia FX Lutz Fuzz

Through the years, I’ve had the pleasure of demoing and reviewing every single pedal release from Horrothia FX, including the Type One, Teeth, Berkeley and Triage. Super excited today to be continuing that tradition, as we bring you their latest creation, the Lutz Fuzz. Not your run-of-the-mill fuzz pedal here, kiddos – this one has a huge range of sound, a couple surprises and even a feature I’ve never seen before on any other pedal…

At it’s heart, the Lutz is a two transistor fuzz, with a footswitch-able transistor input boost / buffer stage. It has two 12-way high-pass filter switches, one pre-fuzz, one post-fuzz. These give a 144-way filter matrix to totally hone in on your tone. It has two on/off/on ‘curly cable’ switches on the top edge which simulate the added dulling capacitance of a curly cable plugged between a guitar and the Lutz, or the Lutz and an amp. To the left these simulate a shorter cable, and to right a longer cable. Centre position is off.

Use the Voltage Sag control to lower the voltage and current fed to the circuit. It simulates a dying battery, and practically rolls off the top end and provides compression and squash. The Volume control has a very large range as well. Unity for most settings is around 25%. Bias control to set the voltage bias of the fuzz stage – start with this around 50% and use it to dial in how broken-up / distressed your tone is. The Cap Defeat footswitch takes the power capacitor out of circuit, allowing the circuit to self-oscillate at some settings. This allows you to dial in a drone note to play to, or perhaps to use in sonic experimentation.

The Buffer On switches the input buffer on and off, acting as a boost stage before the fuzz, adding more gain and sustain. The Lutz has a quiet relay bypass, and runs on 9V from a centre negative 2.1mm DC jack (the standard pedal PSU connector). This thing looks beautiful and clean on the outside, but once you dive in, you quickly realize just how filthy it can get. Cheers as always to Horrothia FX on another brilliant creation – be sure to check out our demo and visit their website, cheers!!