Tone Report Weekly Issue 106 | Page 15

The Woolly Mammoth is contained in a luxuriously hand-painted enclosure, and includes a lifetime warranty by Z. Vex for any problems you may encounter along the way. While the price is a little steep, I know how to appreciate a good fuzz. The Woolly Mammoth really lives up to its namesake, providing gobs upon gobs of gloriously fuzzy mess. The 7 version of this pedal varies from the standard with a unique EQ. According to Z. Vex, the three-band EQ is inspired by a Marshall-style tone stack, which means it is heavily mid focused. Most silicon based fuzzes can be quite scooped, but the Woolly Mammoth 7 really takes precedence over its previous incarnation by giving you insane amounts of control over desirable “byproducts” of the fuzz that are usually unpredictable. The EQ is subtle, and is a more of a sub-EQ within the middle frequencies (not surprising, as it is a Marshall tone stack). This tone stack can be taken either in or out of the circuit, essentially making this a twochannel fuzz. Without the tone stack, the pedal is a little more focused and less boomy, but it lacked some complexity that the tone stack added in the mids. The Wool control is the amount of fuzz introduced into the circuit, but it starts to get interesting with the Pinch control. The Pinch control, according to the manual, controls the pulse width of the fuzz, a control I have only ever seen on synthesizers until now. While the logistics of pulse width are entirely different in a synthesizer context, in the fuzz context it yields some interesting results. The more this setting is cranked, the more the fuzz is crushed down and gated, almost like a bitcrusher. This setting is ToneReport.com 15