“Matt and MGW have collaborated for several years to fine-tune the pedal… And the results will astonish you”: Manson Guitar Works' debut fuzz pedal is here, but will Matt Bellamy’s high-end boutique stompbox be worth the wait?

Sound the horns. Manson Guitar Works’ debut fuzz pedal is finally here. It’s called the Supermassive Black Fuzz, it’s built like a tank, and it promises “vintage traditional fuzz tones as well as otherworldly distortions” that you won’t find from a common or garden variety fuzzbox.

In other words, it is designed for engineering the kind of extra-terrestrial electric guitar tones that co-creator Matt Bellamy relies on for his day job fronting Muse. It looks like this is one of those cases of nominative determinism in action; how it sounds is “supermassive” – a tone big enough to swallow a planet, gaseous giant, or Chthonian, terrestrial, whatever. It’s not fussy.

For those who have been keeping score, the Supermassive Black Fuzz has been years in development. They made the Space Shuttle in shorter order. Bellamy has been workshopping it, fine-tuning it with the Manson R&D team since, well, forever.

But then he is kinda scrupulous about tone, and he has an interest in all this as a majority shareholder at the company. Adrian Thorpe of Thorpy FX collaborated on the project, ensuring that each of the units is built in the UK.

When Guitar World spoke to him in 2022 about this very fuzz, he said it was close, but there was an EQ profile that was just out of reach, and they had been seeking wisdom from studio pros, producers, anyone with a background in electronics to square the circle.

“It will have an EQ curve that you can slide from left to right or invert to create more of a scoop,” said Bellamy. “I usually find most fuzz pedals to be a little bit too full-range. Especially in how they sit in relation to the bass, drums, and vocals.”

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Bellamy said the battleground frequencies for this fuzz sat around the 600 to 900Hz mark – the “low, kind of girthy and middley” set of frequencies sit comfortably under his vocal. Having a fuzz that sat in the mix and stayed out of the way of the vocal was a non-negotiable.

“I don’t like too much crossover with where my vocals sit,” he explained. “Finding the right fuzz pedal to push that low-mid area was something we spent time on. And even after recording, whatever pedal we use, there will also be a lot of intense EQ work.”

This process took the Manson engineers all over the world. They even visited Abbey Road when testing this thing. And all this work you can now hear in the Supermassive Black Fuzz.

It is a dual-footswitch fuzz. Peak turns on your “dynamic band-pass emphasis and boosted tones.” Power engages/disengages the effect. LEDs let you know what’s going on. And you have knobs for Magnitude, Warp, Dimension (a Q control), and Gravity.

It’s designed to sound equally at home when going into a guitar amp or straight into a mixing board.

Nested amongst these dials is a heavy-duty toggle switch for selecting a classic fuzz voicing or the modernistic sci-fi neo-fuzz sounds a la Bellamy in full Battlestar Galactica mode, laser synth gauntlets on, ordering Door Dash via his Korg Kaosspad, communicating on WhatsApp with our space brothers and sisters on the outer Delta Quadrant.

Supermassive Black Fuzz Demo - YouTube

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Okay, back to planet Earth. It’s worth mentioning the build quality on this again.

Manson says its control knobs have been fashioned from 6082T6 aluminum, which any engineer undergrad will tell you is tough enough to be used in bridge construction, and said knobs sit on a super-solid steel grub screw.

Manson Guitar Works is releasing two editions of the pedal. The Standard Edition is priced £259 ($349 approx). The Gold Edition is limited to 100 units, each signed by Bellamy, and comes with a guitar pick tin and polishing cloth, and is priced £349 ($458 approx).

For more details, head over to Manson Guitar Works.