Electro Harmonix Big Muff pi

The Big Muff is a classic. It's been used by a truckload of diverse artists, from Pink Floyd to Nebula to Steely Dan to Frank Zappa. It comes in two version, the US made one, the cheapo Russian one. This article is about the cheapskate version.

Goddamn Electro Harmonix is an annoying company. They make killer sounding boxes, that seem to break down when you do as much as look at them. That's plain sadistic...

And having you Wiggler or Tube Zipper suddenly stop working six moths after you've paid good money to buy the damn thing is not funny. Not at all.

Stuff breaking down shouldn't be such a big issue. I mean, there are a lot of companies out there that manufacture shit gear. All you have to do is not buy it.

Problem is, EH boxes sound pretty damn hot. So you always have to go for some piece of EH gear, thinking "Man, maybe this time the damn thing will actually work. God knows it sounds cool, I can't go through life without owning one, even if it means I have to pay this stupid boutique premium EH seems to charge on all its gear."

And you buy it.

And six months later, boom.

"Yeah, think it's the vacuum tube cradle, man, it keeps giving way, resulting in the tubes being disconnected from the process path."

Fuck that.

The Big Muff π though, is a different case. See, the Russian made version of the Muff (built by EH's sister company Sovtek) is stupidly cheap. I mean, I bought it brand new for, like, 18 euros or something. That's like 4 beers in a pub, right? You don't even care if it breaks, it's cost you nothing.

And it will break. A couple of times.

I mean, this is a stomp box made in the country that gave Lada to the planet, the world's worst made non-italian cars. So yea, everything about the Muff π is pretty shoddy. It might look like a tank, but it sure ain't built like one. The switch is apparently made out of pudding, I managed to break mine 3 days in. The plastic hex nuts that hold the input-output jacks in place are a joke, too. I replaced mine with metal ones I salvaged from an old Peavey amp, because I got bored of going jack-fishing every three days.

Upside is that the design of the board is pretty straightforward, so fixing shit is not that big an issue. Plus, opening up stomp boxes and fixing them is probably the manliest thing ever, so any chance of doing it is a Good Thing.

Sound-wise this baby sounds GREAT. It's not that good for tight rhythm sounds due to the way-too-rich rich spectrum it produces, but it's so great for solos. And solos is what it's all about, right? Right.

You can get seriously fat and creamy tones, especially with the sustain dial around the 2 o'clock position. It sounds rather like a fuzz box, but it also works much better along a wah pedal than most fuzzboxes, which is pretty cool.

Volume settings should depend on your rig. Going straight to the input of a JCM 9000, volumes larger than the 3 o'clock position tend to clog things up a bit. But hey, some of you might like that. I don't. I don't get nu metal, see.

The tone dial is very sensitive, and is what makes the Muff an interesting box. As you turn the thing around, you get a huge variety of wildly varying spectra, all of them seriously SOLO material. My personal favourite is 11 o' clock.

So, overall, if you don't mind a bit of fiddling around with a soldering iron that much, the Big Muff π is a good buy. It's certainly worth the money (it would be really hard not to) And there's at least one solo out there that will sound way better through the Muff.

By AC. Posted at 2007-11-10 18:03:47