Nokie wrote:Nokie may indeed be correct that Red Rhodes designed the Award version but I need a little more verifiable information than that. It's not a strong enough premise for me. Hence, I don't yet consider the schematic for the FuzzRite given in the Award amp as a Red Rhodes design. I don't know that Red Rhodes himself ever took credit for designing that one.
Yeah, I agree something more conclusive would be nice. Though I'm not sure that Red taking credit for creating the fuzz unit is actually any more verifiable than Nokie saying as much. A lot of this stuff is anecdotal, including the rise and fall of Mosrite. I doubt there's even verifiable proof that Sanner even designed the Fuzzrite circuit attributed to him .
The only verifiable thing I've seen along these lines is the Glen Snoddy fuzz patent that became the Gibson/Maestro FZ-1 (filed May 3, 1962, granted Oct. 19, 1965). Beyond that, there's the Tone Bender in the UK which was, according to the internet, more or less a modified version of the FZ-1. At any rate, neither of their respective schematics have much a commonality with the Award fuzz circuit. This seems to have been unexplored territory at the time, as some of the unconventional implementations would suggest. So I suppose the question remains: Whomever engineered the Award amps in 1966, would they even know how to tailor a satisfactory fuzz effect or would they simply copy a proven and desirable (and unpatented) circuit as Nokie has stated? And if it was the Rhodes circuit they were using, was Red even aware of this?
Brinkman wrote:Yeah, it is pretty subjective. But not subjective enough that I would suggest the differences between the Red Rhodes fuzz effect and that of your typical Sanner Fuzzrite are indistinguishable to the ear.Nokie wrote:The FuzzRite that appears in the Award Amp sounds to me very much like a pedal FuzzRite though I'll agree that the two are not completely indistinguishable.
Sorry, I wasn't being very clear here. While I completely agree, I was actually referring to all the pre-'66 Ventures' recordings with fuzz and before them, the Ann Margret track "I Just Don't Understand" (1961) featuring Billy Strange equipped with a Red Rhodes fuzz unit.