Manson Supermassive Black Fuzz review: heavy, heady filter fuzz that’s not just for Muse worship
£259, mansonguitarworks.com
Matt Bellamy is a fuzz guy. You kind of have to be, to not only play guitars with in-built fuzzes, but for that in-built fuzz to be the Z.vex Fuzz Factory, a fuzz that’s as fantastic as it is finicky. There are few more prominent modern champions of weird, spitty, chaotic fuzz guitar tones than Muse, and for many Bellamy’s guitar sound is the touchstone for Fuzz Factory tones and fuzz as a whole.
READ MORE: The best fuzz pedals for all styles and budgets
And so we, finally, have a signature Matt Bellamy fuzz pedal. Which is, perhaps surprisingly, not a signature Fuzz Factory. It is instead made by Manson, a company that Bellamy is the majority shareholder of. It’s a collaboration with UK-based builder ThorpyFX, which has allowed Manson to both tap his wealth of experience in circuit design and keep things all UK-made.
Image: Adam Gasson
Manson Supermassive Black Fuzz – what is it?
The Supermassive Black Fuzz (which I will now just call the SMBF so that the internet doesn’t run out of ink) is, tonally, inspired by the fuzz sounds heard specifically on the song Supermassive Black Hole. Brits will remember this track as being Muse’s highest-charting UK hit, and Americans will remember it from the baseball scene in the first Twilight film. It’s obviously a killer song – it remains their most enduring hit from that era when Muse were kicking out insane, fuzzy and theatrical hard rock that didn’t really sound like anything else on the radio. The pedal uses the thick, saturated guitar lines as a jumping off point to shape a fuzz with a lot of tricks up its sleeve for something ostensibly based off a single track.
Manson Guitar Works doesn’t lay out the exact structure of the fuzz circuit, but suffice it to say that it’s very much its own thing. Notably it’s not really a Fuzz Factory-inspired thing, at least not from a controls perspective, and its tone stack sets it very far apart from any specific vintage lineage. The core fuzz sound runs into an aggressive filter with variable Q, with the Peak footswitch engaging a boosted allpass/static phase filter.
The controls here are named in the grand tradition of ‘theme over function’ – you’ve got Magnitude, Warp, Dimension and Gravity, which are respectively volume, tone, filter Q and gain. It was pretty easy to remember Magnitude as volume, but I’ll be honest, I did have to frequently refer to the manual for the others. At least the EQ on/off switch is fairly unambiguously named, which is both good from a UX standpoint and a slight missed opportunity from a theming standpoint. Presumably “Hawking radiation on/off” didn’t quite fit on the toggle washer…
Strangely, the gain/volume and filter/Q controls are diagonally opposite from each other. This hardly makes the pedal unusable, obviously, but it’s perhaps not the most intuitive way of laying the knobs out, especially when they’ve already got non-standard names. It means that in your head you can’t easily divide the control surface into two vertical or horizontal halves, one for the core fuzz controls and one for the filter controls – it’s all just a soup of ‘controls.’
The engraved metal knobs also don’t really help on the UX front. They may be fairly indestructible, but they only have a tiny grey-on-silver line to tell you where they’re pointing. At a glance across a dark stage it’s basically impossible to see your settings. Again, not really a dealbreaker, but it’s another tick in the ‘form over function’ checklist. Cool is cool until it’s so cool it’s hard to use. But never mind that – how are the sounds?
Image: Adam Gasson
Manson Supermassive Black Fuzz – build quality and usability
Perhaps fittingly for a pedal named after a black hole, the Supermassive Black Fuzz is dense. Drop this thing on the floor, it’s more likely to tunnel through to the centre of the Earth than break. The knobs are milled from aluminium, and engraved with custom designs, and are clearly extremely sturdy.
The double-sloped enclosure is also engraved aluminium, with a spacey black hole design that extends over the back edge. Aesthetically it’s undeniably striking, although I do wish that there was a little less logo on the thing – the design is sleek, dark and intriguing, but the massive typography tips the balance into perhaps overwhelming visual maximalism. Oh well – that’s probably on me for expecting any kind of restraint from a Muse-related product.
Image: Adam Gasson
Manson Supermassive Black Fuzz – sounds
First things first – the SMBF can indeed make you sound like the hit 2006 song and 2008 vampire baseball jam Supermassive Black Hole. How close you can get relies on a few more aspects of the rest of your setup – you’ll definitely want to make sure your amp is relatively clean so that you’re focusing more on the crunch and splat, but that sound is absolutely in here. But here’s the interesting thing – the tone that apes that song absolutely one of the more restrained ones on offer. This thing can get bonkers.
First off let’s remove the filter and the “Peak” boost from the equation to get a taste for the raw fuzz. It ranges from spluttery and bright on the lower settings to full-on tonal destruction in the higher gain-ranges. I recently modified a Boss FZ-2 PCB to remove the octave aspect from the fuzz – the SMBF reminds me a little of that sound. It has the massive full-range approach of a more modern EQ and circuit design, combined with the chaotic, aggressive saturation of a more vintage unit. “Best of both worlds” is trite, but…
On its own this would be a mightily impressive two-knob fuzz. For such a wild sound it has a strangely high-fidelity quality to it – it’s like a fully-produced fuzz tone, complete with studio compression and mastering. However this is not the full story, obviously – it is time to reintroduce that filter, which we can do with a quick flick of the EQ on/off switch.
This is not just a RAT-style high-end roll off or even a scooped Big Muff tilt control. It’s far more resonant a filter, and its operation is highly dependent on how you have that Q control set. Set wide, the filter is good for pretty broad tonal adjustments, but set it narrow and the fun truly begins. It’s great for honking, screaming leads, as well as for thick sludge metal tones – and, for a more subtle textural layer, it can also turn your guitar totally anaemic for some spikey, clanging riffs that will work fantastically in a fuller mix.
The Peak footswitch isn’t a straight ahead boost mode, but instead a boosted static filter – it’s pretty subtle without the EQ engaged, but with it on, it becomes even more nasal and aggressive. It’s a great addition, really, as it gives you a pretty viable way of going from a rhythm to a lead tone – or just making the overall thing just that much more aggressive.
But for all of the talk of aggression, it is a fantastically versatile fuzz – I just kept on finding tones in it, even when I took off my reviewer hat and went full self-indulgent drone metal with the thing. Relatedly it’s also a fantastic fuzz for stacking – a RAT afterwards was incredibly gratifying in how it smoothed off some of the sharper edges for an even thicker block of fuzz.
Sonically, it’s pretty hard to fault the SMBF, however there is one particular area where the pedal’s monolithic approach to UX has led to a tonal limitation – namely, the lack of an expression input. In my playing I was messing around with the filter control, and the sharp Q and exaggerated response lent the actual sweeping motion a dynamic and ear-catching character, one of an extreme and modern fuzz wah. But unlike, say, the Death By Audio Evil Filter, you’ve got no way to manipulate the filter as you play, unless you count kneeling down and messing with the knob. That’s doable in some situations, but a more repeatable and hands-off solution would have really elevated the chaos-summoning possibilities of the unit.
Image: Adam Gasson
Manson Supermassive Black Fuzz – should I buy one?
The SMBF is by no means a perfect pedal. Its bespoke-engraved knobs would be a shame to replace, but if I was to add this to any kind of live board I would tearfully replace them with ones I could actually see. Relatedly its slightly confounding control scheme is something that can be overcome with use, however for quick adjustments on the fly it is still a little annoying to have to rolodex four abstract black hole-related concepts and quickly match them to volume, gain, filter and Q.
Another elephant in the room: this is an expensive fuzz. Knowing the price and listening to the ultra-clean, ultra in-depth sounds, it is possible to square how much it costs with what it can do. But it’s still over £250 for a four-knob fuzz. The cash is undeniably felt in the build and sonic quality, and thanks to the EQ and Peak switches it’s not like it’s a single-mode effect – but it’ll be pricey enough to give a lot of players understandable pause.
With that said, the sonics are pretty much faultless. If there is ever a V2 of this pedal, and I hope there is because I want to see this circuit continue to exist and develop, I’d put expression control and a more sensible layout at the top of my wishlist. But until then this is still an extremely cool fuzz, one that will have you fast approach Supermassive Black Hole’s tones and shoot well past the event horizon, all the way into that little room with Matthew McConaughey in it shouting at bookcases.
Image: Adam Gasson
Manson Supermassive Black Fuzz – alternatives
As mentioned it’s not like this is a clone of any one other fuzz circuit, but if you’re both a Muse fan and a fuzz fan I’d be remiss not to mention the ZVEX Fuzz Factory, of course, which is the actual fuzz you hear on that track, and the one Bellamy has used for years.
Another boutique option would be the Death By Audio Evil Filter, a chaotic fuzz driven through a very, well, evil filter. If you aren’t as bothered about the fuzz-wah nature of it or are put off by the DBA option’s price, then you could also take a look at the DOD Carcosa, a very chaotic-sounding box that straddles the line between a spluttery vintage voice and a modern level of amp-shattering output.
Finally, to go for something a literal 10th of the budget of the SMBF, you could gravitate towards something like the Behringer SF300, a clone of the long discontinued (change this please Boss) FZ-2 Hyperfuzz, which is a vintage fuzz combined with a more modern active EQ.
[Editor’s Note: Meng Ru Kuok, Founder & CEO of Caldecott Music Group is a part owner of Manson Guitar Works. Guitar.com is part of Caldecott Music Group]
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Source: www.guitar-bass.net
