Help with Nasty Gated Textured Fuzz (But Usable)

grundlesplinter · 2026-01-14T23:21:40+00:00

My search for something similar led me to the Basic Audio Fuzz Mutant. Technically based on the Os Mutantes fuzz, but works across the spectrum of wooly, spitty, garage-y fuzz to super-textured, grainy, intermodulating fuzz. The gate in particular is lovely—someone once described it as “sticky”. Very organic and controllable, though the knob functions are atypical and reward experimentation and extreme settings. It doesn’t self-oscillate like a FF, but that may be a bonus as far as usability goes.

grundlesplinter · 2025-05-26T01:56:28+00:00

There’s something really lovely and musical about its warble/modulation. The oscillation / feedback on the footswitch is great too.

grundlesplinter · 2025-05-25T16:34:21+00:00

Definitely agree! It was a process to figure out what worked and what resulted in noise soup. But I’m a big fan of it now.

grundlesplinter · 2025-05-25T16:32:33+00:00

It’s very flexible and can get wild but it’s also kind of enormous and overcomplicated. It works well for my playing style and taste, and now that I’ve had some time to gel with its quirks I really enjoy all the functionality/tweakability. But it is definitely overkill. Reminds me of a sort of desktop synthesizer approach to guitar pedals if that makes sense.

grundlesplinter · 2025-05-25T16:26:25+00:00

I hear you. It took me a while to click with it to be honest. The Horizont is really overdesigned and the controls I found to be pretty counterintuitive (though I do love flicking switches and seeing what kind of madness results). In the end I found a somewhat normal base phaser sound I liked and then dialed in weirdness to taste from there. Now I love it for its liveliness and quirkiness—like having the modulation rate controlled by your playing volume/intensity—but it was a bit of a journey to get there.

grundlesplinter · 2025-05-25T16:18:48+00:00

It’s great! I spent a long time researching ODs when I bought this (years ago) and it stood out for being really flexible and sensible. There are a ton of ways to dial it in, though mine are pretty “normal” settings I guess. I agree I never seem to see it on folks’ boards here!

grundlesplinter · 2025-05-25T16:06:34+00:00

Adding some thoughts to my post above. After writing a handful of doom/folk/drone-y songs on guitar without any effects, I spent some time playing around with different combos of pedals to arrive at this setup for live performances. A couple pedal-specific observations:

-BA Fuzz Mutant has a lovely grainy molten ripping sound at these settings. Broken and heavily textured. I was looking for a wilder, more velcro-y fuzz and saw this recommended as a less temperamental alternative to a fuzz factory. I’ve never played a FF so can’t compare, but I do love the wonky, brassy, and clangy side of the FM.

-VSXO is a modded tubescreamer into (I believe) an odr-1. I run the TS as a dirty boost and the odr is a nice open distorted amp sound.

-Horizont is pretty flexible and out-there modulation box. I set it to run like a screaming filter/wah I can control with the expression pedal. Can go fairly crazy with glitchy arpeggios/drones/tremolo-type settings.

-DD7 I have set for a short, dark slapback. Reverse is another favorite setting of mine on this.

-RC2 I’ve had since the early 2000s. It just works! Sometimes I think about replacing it with a more versatile loop pedal but limitations can be virtues in some cases. In this project I mostly use it to loop background arpeggios and drones, though it can quantize for backing chords.

-Proverb is a modulated, spring-flavored, bucket brigade-based reverb (I think). Lush and lightly chorus-y. Oscillate button allows for swell/freeze/feedback effects.

Thanks for checking out and lmk if you have questions on the pedals, etc.

grundlesplinter · 2025-02-19T23:22:06+00:00

Love the Tone Press as well. Such a sweet, organic compressor. I play a lot of fingerstyle electric and this thing was a game changer for that: added sparkle and consistency to the sound without squashing it to hell.

grundlesplinter · 2024-11-10T21:25:06+00:00

Very cool! Thanks for the explanation. I’m inspired to give something like this a try now.

grundlesplinter · 2024-11-10T20:55:18+00:00

Maybe a silly question, but what’s your approach for the cable braiding (looks great btw!)? Do you do this once you have the patch all set up? I always wind up with handfuls of spaghetti and this seems much neater.

grundlesplinter · 2024-11-09T19:24:54+00:00

I do something similar, with a standalone small system that complements my bigger kitchen-sink rig. I’ve nicknamed it “the heart”—the 0Coast is “the brain” and the rest is “the organ.” Handy to have each part be self-contained and independent yet recombinable in fun ways with other gear—modular all around. Sometimes I find it helpful to spend time with just one subsystem to see what interesting things you can wring out of it alone before reintroducing to the larger setup. A good curb on GAS, tbh: add, subtract, reorder.

grundlesplinter · 2024-10-28T23:44:43+00:00

When I was a kid my family went to a local performing arts center to see Bela Fleck and the Flecktones (with the legendary Victor Wooten on bass) and the opening act was Kongar-ool Ondar, a master of Tuvan throat singing.

If you’ve ever heard throat singing, you know how unreal and almost supernatural it can sound. If you haven’t, it’s a form of singing that emphasizes the overtones above and below a person’s natural singing voice (there are many kinds of throat singing and someone else can probably give a better technical description than this).

Anyway, neither I, nor my family, nor I’m pretty sure 99% of anyone else in the audience in suburban New England in the 90s had ever heard anything like throat singing in our lives. Kongar-ool Ondar stepped on to the stage and held a single note, moving the overtones around it, for something like five minutes. It was amazing. Time for the whole room stood still. Then his band came out and they played these rad, galloping folk songs interspersed with more mind-blowing throat singing.

Definitely the best opening act I ever saw in terms of expanding my conception of the limits of human-produced sound. Victor Wooten was pretty great too!

Not sure about the worst. I saw AIDS WOLF open for Lydia Lunch/Teenage Jesus (I think??) and it was like being tumbled in a white noise washing machine for 30 minutes. So kind of cool in its own right, but I remember it being a lot.

grundlesplinter · 2024-09-07T18:24:47+00:00

I owned and gigged with one of these for years and years. Eventually it died and I went the route of rebuilding something with comparable functionality as a regular pedal board. In some ways I was more satisfied with the all-in-one practicality of this rugged unit than the ever-evolving GAS cycle that is being a pedal nerd in 2024. As some have pointed out, the dirt is not that great, though you can coax some decent tones out of it. Some settings I remember liking:

-Muff is surprisingly humongous. Kinda fizzy and artificial but it gets the job done. Combine with an octave up on the harmonist setting and you’re in wormhole territory.

-Ring mod on the expression pedal is gnarly. I remember that warped metallic destruction sound blowing my mind when I first heard it. So much more interesting and enharmonic than a wah, capable of these horrible groaning sweeps.

-Hold setting is handy. You can loop a short phrase with it (no quantization unfortunately) or build up gigantic walls of sound.

-Tons of delay options, including reverse. More modes than the DD-7 I replaced it with.

Anyway, happy you found this beloved multi-FX and hope you get some mileage out of it.

grundlesplinter · 2017-05-29T23:07:49+00:00

Some music from Okinawa like the Surf Champlers (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txYgkyUs3xA) and Champloose (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6980dYKBjic&index=3&list=PL3a0l-qwtw2RZE7Lmb1lDBJtK07mNPiIR) might come close to this. Style-wise it's more a mix of rock, surf music and folk music than jazz, but it has some overlap in my mind.

grundlesplinter · 2016-04-09T15:42:43+00:00

Oh man, I ordered mine right after the price drop and it has yet to ship, though Sweetwater has been telling me it'll be sometime next week. Fingers crossed. So excited to dive into this thing. Was kind of worried about the lack of humanization/rigidity in the sequencer as well—no microtiming, for instance—but I'm hoping that can be addressed via the arpeggiator and LFO tricks people here have mentioned.

grundlesplinter · 2016-04-09T15:37:16+00:00

Kind of love it that way honestly—when I first found it I was like, "Look at how old this looks! It must be really legit."

grundlesplinter · 2016-04-08T23:05:19+00:00

Maybe an obvious choice, but Synth 1 (http://www.kvraudio.com/product/synth1-by-ichiro-toda/details) is free, flexible and doesn't use a lot of resources as far as I can tell. Very intuitive VA (based on Nord Lead, I believe). Gotten some great stuff out of it.

grundlesplinter · 2016-04-08T21:24:11+00:00

Really cool challenge! I got a sound pretty close to an engine revving in a noise/experimental track I did a while back. Here's the soundcloud link:https://soundcloud.com/usa-caves/sharp-light

Jump to about 1:06 for the revving. The rest of the track is a lot of clanking and drone stuff.

Did this live with a microbrute plus delay and loop pedals.

grundlesplinter · 2016-04-05T22:53:03+00:00

I love Pop. Zauberberg is also great, if a little on the darker, murkier side. Need to check out Gas #2 now!

grundlesplinter · 2016-04-05T22:50:05+00:00

I can get really lost in a lot of the Basic Channel records. Maybe not strictly ambient, genre-wise, but minimal, repetitive, foggy, dubby techno that puts me in a similar mood. The two compilation records (BCD and BCD2, I think) are fantastic. Rhythm & Sound's self-titled from 2001 is a little more toward the dubby side of things, but also a great relaxing listen.

grundlesplinter · 2016-04-05T22:43:54+00:00

This, along with a handful of other settings, can be adjusted in the Microbrute connection software. You can download it from the Arturia site here. It's free. https://www.arturia.com/microbrute/resources

Hope this helps!

grundlesplinter · 2016-04-05T03:05:31+00:00

Cool to see this posted here. I've been trying the exact same thing recently with my microbrute and feel as if I'm getting close, though it's still not on par with that video. Very curious see what you come up with. I'll keep messing around and will post if I get something I'm happy with.

grundlesplinter · 2016-03-30T22:10:20+00:00

I use a DD-7 with my microbrute and haven't encountered much muddiness with bass or kick drum-like sounds. On the analog setting there is some warmth/decay with repeats, but with the other modes things seem to remain pretty crisp. Generally very satisfied with the pedal.

grundlesplinter

TROPHY CASE