Recently, I found out that a mutual friend of a friend of mine was making fuzz pedals here in Seattle. Darren Chase is the maker of the One Knob Wonder (update: the One Knob Wonder is now called the “Ape Blaster Fuzz“), a fuzz pedal with a unique take on the sound and subtleties of raw and dirt fuzz-tone distortion. I have to admit that as a guitar player and an audio engineer that the quest for tone has been and will be a path of endless possibilities and rightly so. Who wants to settle for good enough when one can improve or augment ones palette of sonic devastation? Not I.
So, enter Black Hand Analog, the brain child of Darren who plays guitar in Ancient Warlocks, a mighty fuzzed vintage sounding outfit with a pension for big hairy, Sasquatch-like forest/mountain beings as is evident in the bands artwork for their releases. And rightly so. I have a modest collection of vintage fuzz pedals myself as well as more modern-retro distortion/fuzz boxes so when I saw pictures of some of his pedals online I was intrigued and contacted Darren via some online social network and asked him if I could check out his creations. Low and behold we exchanged emails and phone numbers and set up a time to demo Darren’s prototype of the One Knob Wonder. We hung out for a day at Witch Ape Studio and put the pedal to the metal so to speak and recorded a demo of Black Hand Analog’s flag ship pedal even though still not in full production as of yet.
Here is the demo that we recorded “quick and dirty” as a friend would say to me. Enjoy!