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Felix Pappalardi Fuzz sound

Jakeson99

Jakeson99

Mar 5, 2025
13
4
#1
After listening to this performance(hell, the whole concert even) a million times I can never get over the chainsaw bass Felix is playing, you can hear it kick at around 1:19. That incredible smooth yet jagged sound is so captivating and aggresive as a pitbull on steroids.
Are there any effects that come really close to emulating this specific sound? After some digging around its said that he used multiple cranked Sunn 200S's but I am not sure.
MOUNTAIN - Southbound Train Live at Woodstock
 
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#13
So Anyway, no opinion on how to get that sound. I always thought the amps back then couldn't handle a Gibson bass at concert volume without breaking up.... and Felix made the most of it. But I'm probably wrong.

I got to see Mountain live several times back in the 70's. Felix started me on my bass journey.

I hope you find your tone and update us on your quest.
 
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#14
There’s nothing like a cranked sunn 200s. Nothing.
IMG_7436.jpeg
 
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#15
Jakeson99 said:
After listening to this performance(hell, the whole concert even) a million times I can never get over the chainsaw bass Felix is playing, you can hear it kick at around 1:19. That incredible smooth yet jagged sound is so captivating and aggresive as a pitbull on steroids.
Are there any effects that come really close to emulating this specific sound? After some digging around its said that he used multiple cranked Sunn 200S's but I am not sure.
MOUNTAIN - Southbound Train Live at Woodstock
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Agreed with the first comment- the “trick” was that big overwound neck pickup in his bass that smashed his tube amplifiers with a bunch of bass and low-mids- those pickups were super hot for the era and tended to clip most input stages. Clipping circuits (including tubes) tend to turn into compressed fuzz when hit with lots of low-frequency information like what the “mudbucker” pickup he used was infamous for- I used to get a similar “fuzz” tone running a 50-watt Fender Bassman head at full volume pushed by a Gibson TB+ (another dark/hot Gibson pickup) neck pickup into a single 15” or 18” bass cab. bI think he got it using both tube and solid state Sunn heads over the years- the bass itself was really the key IMO. IME, there are tons of drive circuits that can get in this ballpark when hit with the right kind of signal (high-output and dark pickup) and set for high gain, or alternatively with a more typical bass pickup a fat and slightly gated fuzz (gating being great for his buzzier textures, grabbing it from the clipping rather than your actual bass signal) like a Zvex Mastotron with the Sub Switch boosted can get in a very similar ballpark with most any bass with a neck pickup IME. Brassmaster/B:assmaster derivatives can also get some of that vibe IME, though much less tweakable.

TroyBassLover said:
I love it. The OP asks a simple question....IS there an effect that has the Felix sound?

And all we get, besides my post with an exact answer, is people basically berating the dude for even asking. Or giving otherwise unhelpful answers. People need to really think before pressing post.
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Your answer is hardly the definitive one, considering that the pedal you posted doesn’t emulate Felix’s actual signal path at all. It’s a cool and fairly novel approach for a fuzz pedal, but a sound like this can be made in other ways too and most of the demos of the Avalanche don’t really sound quite right to me (at least not what I’d want out of that kind of tone), not to say it isn’t capable of it though! From the demos I feel like I can get some very similar tones from my Mastotron FWIW (its a fuzz that sounds like a blended signal as well at many settings due to the shaping of the input signal, similar to how Felix's tone had that blended vibe despite not actually being a blended signal), though the Mastotron can do a whole lot of other cool stuff too.

I don’t see any posts berating the OP at all unless something has been deleted? Sorry you are having a bad day!
 
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#16
Bass4ThePublic said:
There’s nothing like a cranked sunn 200s. Nothing.
View attachment 7168834
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I played guitar in a rock trio in the early '70's in which I used an SVT head and a Marshall 8 x 10 cabinet and the bass player had a 200S head and cab.

Just for fun at one gig, I suggested we swap heads. Suddenly I was getting all kinds of overdriven-tube sustain, and Dave was liking the way his bass was sounding. Afterward, he said, "Hmm. I'd been thinking that I needed to replace my speakers, but they sounded fine with your SVT head."

How young and dumb were we? We went right back to using our original setups for the rest of our gigs until the band broke up.
 
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#17
brianrost said:
He didn’t use fuzz boxes, just cranked amps being pummelled by the hot output of a Gibson mudbucker. Felix’s live recordings display far more distortion than the studio ones, which were hardly clean.

He was much more aggressive about pushing the amps, but Jack Bruce and Andy Fraser (of Free) also got their buzzy sounds that way.
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I believe I've read that while Felix used an EB-0, which obviously had a single neck-position mudbucker pickup, Jack Bruce used his only EB-3's bridge pickup, which might account for some of the difference between his sound and Felix's.
 
#19
Guitalia said:
I believe I've read that while Felix used an EB-0, which obviously had a single neck-position mudbucker pickup, Jack Bruce used his only EB-3's bridge pickup, which might account for some of the difference between his sound and Felix's.
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Pappalardi used both the EB-0 and the violin-shaped EB-1 which are both single-pickup basses. So turn that Sidewinder up and burn through any preamp - apart from possibly SVT - known at the time...:laugh:

With Bruce, things get a bit more complicated. While there are pictures of him playing a late '60s EB-0, his "main" '65 EB-3 also had electronics modded with a diode which helped push his Marshalls into overdrive at lower power. His "typical" sound from the Cream live recordings never struck me as bridge pickup only, though...that would be a lot closer to what Andy Fraser sounded like most of the time during his Free days...

Apologies to OP for a thread derail.
 
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