This beautiful little fuzz is built on a vintage, hand selected, space grade pencil tube and N.O.S. germanium point-contact crystal diodes—there’s a lot of glass in this pedal! This combination of hot biased and cold-biased tube gain stages with crystal diode clipping circuitry blends thermionic (asymmetrical) and solid-state (symmetrical) distortions to generate beautiful fuzzed guitar tones. At full throttle this little pedal can generate outrageous ‘blocking-distortion’ which sounds like a tube amp being pushed beyond it’s limits.
Rolling back the ‘Fuzz’ control creates an immense, bold fuzz tone with endless amounts of smooth liquid sustain that stretches notes into infinity. At lower fuzz settings the MERCURY cleans up to produce natural sounding (real!) tube dirt and overdrive with unprecedented clarity and string-to-string definition. It’s an incredibly simple, yet versatile pedal.
Sub-miniature (or pencil) tubes were developed during World War II for missile control and therefore had to be exceptionally tough devices. These tubes were manufactured to meet the stringent MIL-E-1 specification for reliability and designed for long service life under conditions of severe shock, vibration (20,000G!), high temperature and high altitude. The sub-miniature tubes represent the pinnacle of tube technology and offer more consistent performance than the early transistors. Effectrode is now utilising these little tubes for peaceful purposes—to create extremely compact and tough little effects pedals!
Note: This is a limited edition pedal. Due to the limited availability of high quality N.O.S. tubes, we cannot guarantee continued production of this pedal for any amount of time.
FEATURES
- 100% pure analogue vacuum tube audio path operating at amp plate voltages
- Fuzz Flexibility: Stacks of fuzz sounds from devastating over-the-top tube amp ‘blocking distortion’, to classic 70s Page and Clapton fuzz—the fuzz cleans-up very nicely when the guitar volume knob is rolled back to produce warm, tubey drive tones.
- ‘BIAS’ Switch: Enables you to center bias or hot bias or cold bias the second tube stage.
- Crystal Diodes: A unique cascaded arrangement of vintage germanium crystal diodes gives the MERCURY more dynamic range and a rich, complex tone.
- True Bypass: With Effectrode’s unique ‘anti-pop’ or ‘thump’ footswitching circuitry
- Fitted with N.O.S Sylvania tube: Each MERCURY fuzz pedal is fitted with a hand-selected 6948 sub-miniature tube. This is one of the finest tubes ever built by any manufacturer at any time in history.
- ‘Dakaware’ Knobs: Authentic bakelite ‘Dakaware’, Chicago 1510 knobs custom manufactured for Effectrode in the U.S.A using the original 1940s moulds.
- Includes 12V Wall-wart Power Supply: High quality low-noise switched mode 12VDC at 1.5A wall-wart compatible with all our pedals. Accepts 100V to 240VAC mains input and comes with different mains outlet adaptor plugs, so there is always a plug that fits the country that you are playing in.
- John Glenn was the first American astronaut to orbit the Earth in 1962 putting the Americans ahead of the Russians in the space race for the first time. The Effectrode Mercury fuzz pedal is named after the space vehicle, or capsule, in which he made 3 orbits of the Earth and is our tribute to the fantastic achievement of Glenn and all those involved at NASA.
