EarthQuaker Devices Hoof Fuzz Demo/Review

[Freethenoise]

Hey Lads,
Whipped this together today.

[youtube][/youtube]

Very, very nice sounding muff style fuzz with a control for the all important midrange. Got it cheap at a scratch and dent sale.

Thanks guys,
-FTN

[Fakir Mustache]

Cool. Cool channel too.

I think the Sovtek Muffs also had some midrange thing, built into the tone control, but I can't be sure because I heard about it on the internet.

[Concretebadger]

Nice vid. It's great that you checked out how the pedal behaves with the gain/sustain knob backed off. That and the 'guitar volume knob rolled off' approach...a lot of fuzzes can do that, but never Muffs. They often sound a bit cack unless the sustain's cranked. TBH, the EHX reissues are too high-gain and 'modern'-sounding for me too - a more 'articulate' fuzz that can actually *do* palm mutes, e.g. the old triangle and ram's head era, is tempting. Nothing beats the kick-in-the-gut thump of an MBM IC Muff for chords, but I've been eyeing up a Hoof for a while. Hmm...

[Freethenoise]

Nice vid. It's great that you checked out how the pedal behaves with the gain/sustain knob backed off. That and the 'guitar volume knob rolled off' approach...a lot of fuzzes can do that, but never Muffs. They often sound a bit cack unless the sustain's cranked. TBH, the EHX reissues are too high-gain and 'modern'-sounding for me too - a more 'articulate' fuzz that can actually *do* palm mutes, e.g. the old triangle and ram's head era, is tempting. Nothing beats the kick-in-the-gut thump of an MBM IC Muff for chords, but I've been eyeing up a Hoof for a while. Hmm...

First of all, thank you for your kind words, I really do try to show everything that a pedal can squeeze out in terms of functions and leave the sound up to the listener to decide.

The fact that the Hoof cleans up reasonably well initially surprised me. There's still that fat compression, just less gain when altering the guitars volume knob. The Hoof sounds good all through the gain dial, which initially shocked me too. I find that a lot of the time I'm only using half the gain on it simply because that's enough for me. Still plenty thick for good heavy Dinosaur Jr. type rhythms or Black Keys sludgy blues and still plenty of sustain for diddly-diddly lead tones.

I think (in my opinion of course) that a lot of the modern EHX muff's are not very useful for what I want in a heavy fuzz pedal. As you said, too modern sounding and not entirely articulate.
This is just me nit picking again though. The Tone Wicker one is really nice, that seemed to fix a lot of issues that the stock NYC reissue had.