We love pretty much anything that has a retro or vintage vibe, look or feel around here, and today’s pedal checks off all of those boxes with ease. The SolidGoldFX Imperial MkII Fuzz looks like it was made in the 80’s, sounds right out of the 70’s and has a modern feel that makes it a perfect fuzz all-around. Inspired by the vintage JEN Jumbo Fuzz, the MkII has four simple sliders that control a wide range of tonal bliss, producing a ripping and royally raucous fuzz with impeccable manners…
True to the original SolidGoldFX Imperial, the MkII retains a high impedance JFET preamp, giving you a low noise floor detail and definition. Bass, guitar or synth sound amazing – stick it anywhere in your effects chain and feel free to ride your Volume knob for clean-up – the Imperial’s preamp will respond. While the Tone stack is carried over from the original design, a new Contour slider replaces the mids switch, which changes the frequency of the high-pass filter in the tone stack. This allows you to boost or scoop your mids, with every shade in between.
This gem also features an impressive noise gate, swapping out the Jumbo Fuzz’s germanium transistor design with silicon devices and giving it an improved envelope generator, to ensure consistency and response throughout. Having fine-tuned the Attack and Release, not only does the noise gate allow for virtually zero noise, but it also gives the pedal a unique, sharp attack with no loss of sustain at higher fuzz settings. Align this to a nice, dry attack at low settings, and Imperial MkII will pair great with other dirt boxes, too. The noise gate will even allow you to add fuzz to a hollow-body, while controlling the howl and feedback should you choose.
Dual LED indicators (one for bypass and the other indicating the gate status), top jacks, true bypass switching and retro sliders + vintage inspired artwork round out the feature set here, and it’s all just glorious. Stoner doom low end, classic rock distortion, shoegaze-y sustain and much more are easily achievable with the SolidGoldFX Imperial MkII Fuzz. The four sliders may look simple, but the range in each is so broad that you’ll get lost for hours investigating all that it has to offer. This is our first pedal review and demo from SolidGoldFX in a couple years, and we couldn’t be happier to start off with this amazing machine. Head to their website for more info, and be sure to hear it in action in our demo below!
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