Raato Custom Guitars is a Finnish maker of ultramodern handcrafted electric guitars and basses. Recently Raato’s main man Mika Ruotsalainen has introduced three effect pedals – a treble booster, as well as a pair of fuzz-boxes.
The Raato Fuzzrocity (268 €) is a Fuzz Face-flavoured silicon fuzz made for the modern guitarist. When I say ”Fuzz Face-flavoured” I mean the character of the fuzz sound, but the Fuzzrocity is not a clone of a vintage Fuzz Face.
Mika showed me a few Fuzzrocity pedals he was working on, when I visited his workshop, and I could see he was using high-quality parts and bespoke pcbs to assemble his pedals. The custom graphics are also etched into the pedals’ casings right there in the workshop. The pedal is powered by a Boss-standard 9V power supply.
A vintage Fuzz Face can be a thing of beauty, but it doesn’t offer much scope for adjustment, offering only Fuzz- and Volume-controls, without any option to adjust the resulting fuzz sound itself. Depending on the player’s requirements and equipment a vintage fuzz can sound too bright or too muddy, especially with modern downtuned (or seven-string) guitars.
Additionally, many original Fuzz Faces have a tendency to self-oscillate when used in conjunction with a wah-wah, due to impedance mismatching caused – in most cases – by the wah-pedal.
The Raato Fuzzrocity has been designed from the ground up to give you all of that delicious sound, while also offering plenty of scope for adjustment. There are four controls on offer:
BIAS lets you adjust the operating voltage for the silicon transistors, while HPF stands for ”high-pass filter” and lets you dial out any bottom end that might be clogging up your sound. FUR corresponds to your regular fuzz- or gain-control for the input signal, and LEVEL controls the output level.
Additionally, there’s a three-way mini-toggle that gives you two low-pass filter setting (plus bypass in the middle position) to tame the signals treble content, if necessary.
To get a modern version of a Fuzz Face sound, start off with the BIAS around 4 o’clock and the HPF turned to 7 o’clock. With this setting FUR and LEVEL correspond to a two-knob fuzz’s Fuzz- and Volume-controls, respectively. I’d recommend you set the three-way toggle to the downward position in this case.
But there’s a much wider array of tones to be gleaned from the Raato Fuzzrocity by using the controls to their fullest.
Settings of the BIAS-control have a very large bearing on the character and dynamics of this pedal. Set low BIAS will give you the sound of a ”dying” battery with plenty of gating and graininess. Turning BIAS up gradually will give you firmer fuzz sounds and more dynamic variation. For modern applications with drop-tuned and/or seven-string electrics and baritones, the HPF-knob is a crucial tool to keep any unwanted wooliness at bay. The FUR-control is – naturally – interactive with the BIAS settings, and it will take you all the way from ”broken sitar” tones and mild overdrive to doomsday fuzz. The three-way treble switch is really useful in tailoring the table content to suit your needs.
Mika Ruotsalainen has designed the Raato Fuzzrocity to work well with vintage-style wah-pedals, as you can easily hear in the video at the top of this review, where I have a Vox V845 running directly into the Fuzzrocity.
The video at the bottom of this video will show you for its part how well the Fuzzrocity responds to changes at your guitar’s own volume control.
In my view the Raato Fuzzrocity is a success on all fronts, because it manages to give you a wide variety of vintage-inspire fuzz sounds, without the drawbacks of vintage clones, and with far greater scope for adjustments.
The Fuzzrocity is handcrafted in Finland in very limited numbers and sold at a very reasonable price. This could easily become your go-to fuzz from now on.
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