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Larry Graham fuzz

N

ndrly

May 5, 2007
727
3
Melbourne, Australia
#1
I recently heard Sly and the Family Stone's "Dance to the Music", and there's one part where Larry Graham does a solo, and he used a fuzzbox. Nice sound. Almost sounds like a synth.

Also, I think that the bass on "United States of Whatever" had fuzz used. Sounded like a synth.

What fuzzboxes were used on each respective song? I mean, I'd like to use the same bass tone heard on "United States..." for the "Time is Running Out" intro, but I don't know if the Big Muff can do that kind of tone.
 
#2
#4
Found a schematic of the brassmaster:
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It looks to be passing a bass signal through a full wave bridge, thus squaring it. It would soft clipping since there's no feedback. This would have the effect of raising the pitch an octave on the "brass" part. Followed by a bandpass filter. It would sound like a synth. It mixes regular bass back in and retains the bottom.

This is a very clever circuit for the time of Sly and Family Stone. I'm going to have to hunt down some tracks and listen.
 
#5
+1 on Larry using the Brassmaster and the Juggernaut, although as was mentioned, the Juggernauts are a bad gamble. The Brassmaster was used on many of my favorite funky tracks from the old days. The weird thing is -due to recording technology, mixing/mastering, etc.- the current Brassmaster clones by themselves don't sound anything like the old-school tracks, at least not to my ears. I suspect you'd need to use a lot of EQ to "reshape" the Brassmaster clone into the old Larry tone.
 
#8
The Lurker said:
more accurate to say he was using a Juggernaut back in the 80s or whenever that instructional video was made. Ain't gonna sound like the original recording anyways. Big muff would probably be a better bet.
Click to expand...

Sweet. I'm considering getting a Big Muff. Next time I'm in a guitar shop, and there's a Big Muff available for customers to try out, I'll try it out on bass guitar.

I know it's known for having a boomy low end, but I wonder how it would sound if I took some of it away...
 
#11
ndrly said:
Sweet. I'm considering getting a Big Muff. Next time I'm in a guitar shop, and there's a Big Muff available for customers to try out, I'll try it out on bass guitar.

I know it's known for having a boomy low end, but I wonder how it would sound if I took some of it away...
Click to expand...

if you have a choice, have a look at the Little Big Muff. It's a huge improvement over the old-style big ones; true bypass, more rugged, better hardware, and sounds better too.
 

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