The downside of complex fuzzes is that they’re a little too wide-ranging, with to many settings you’ll probably never use. It’s easy to waste 20 minutes tweaking knobs without ever nailing the perfect tone. This is what inspired the Joe Gore Filth Interactive Fuzz. It has only four controls, but it’s a cornucopia of cool, quirky, and usable fuzz flavors.

The drive and level controls do what you’d expect. But unlike many fuzz drive controls, this one sounds great throughout its range. Extreme settings are molten-lava thick. Lower settings are like slightly cooled lava, maybe?

But the real action is in the two sliders. They're tone controls of a sort, but not in the usual way. Most fuzz tone controls are tone-sucking passive circuits situated downstream from the fuzz effect. But here, the sliders alter the voltages at the transistors, radically changing not only the tone, but also the timbre and response. They profoundly alter the fuzz’s core character.

How to use: Set desired gain and output levels. Move the sliders till it sounds awesome.