A relatively new player in the pedal game, Stone Deaf FX manufactures amplifiers and effects pedals out of Oldham, a town in Greater Manchester, UK. Locally sourced and locally made, Stone Deaf has been making a splash with their brightly painted, uniquely designed pedals and amps. We were lucky enough to play around with some of Stone Deaf’s pedals — the Fig Fumb Fuzz, PDF-2 Parametric Overdrive, and Kliptonite Fuzz — in the Reverb studio.
Fig Fumb Fuzz
The neatest little anagram’d pedal you’ll ever meet, the Fig Fumb offers a unique take on old-school Muff circuits we’ve all come to know and love. Along with a killer list of modernized updates, the Fig Fumb’s circuitry has taken a few tweaks and offers up a far more refined control of your sound so you can tame the wild fuzz, if need be.
On top of incredible Muff tones, the Fig Fumb contains a full-spectrum parametric filter with adjustable gain, giving you the ability to discover different high-gain fuzzes with the flip of a switch and the turn of a knob. An effective noise gate is included in the form of a dual-channel configuration, giving you the option to turn on the noise gate for a solid, blended rhythm section or turn it off for wailing lead tones.
Finally, the Fig Fumb, like many Stone Deaf pedals, has extended expression pedal functionality. Just plug in an expression pedal and you can control frequency sweeps, a wah function, and even a phaser function. If you thought you were getting just another Muff clone with the Fig Fumb, you thought wrong.
PDF-2 Parametric Overdrive
Following in the successful footsteps of its elder sibling the PDF-1, the PDF-2 is the best way to get all of your EQ, boost, and distortion needs met in one simple pedal. Featuring a whole slew of updates that were actually requested by guitarists, it’s safe to say this pedal is one for the people.
This dual-channel pedal sports both clean and dirty channels that can be tweaked using an adjustable gain knob and parametric EQ controls, like the Bandwidth knob that allows you to sweep from a fattened tone to something much thinner and anywhere in between. And you won’t have to worry about hum with the PDF-2’s ultra-low noise floor.
Just like the Fig Fumb, the PDF-2 has an expression pedal jack for both the clean and distorted channels, allowing you to control a frequency control sweep, wah function, and phasing sounds.
Kliptonite Fuzz
If you’ve got a weakness for fuzz, the Kliptonite will be your, well, kryptonite. Giving you a double dose of gain effects with both an overdrive and a fuzz channel, you can dial in anything from velcro-like fuzz tones to warm, tube-saturated overdrive. Parametric filters give you the ability to fine-tune to your heart’s delight.
And with a unique mirror function, you can swap the mixture of fuzz and overdrive. For instance, if you have 25% overdrive and 75% fuzz dialed in, hitting the mirror mix switch will flip your ratio to 25% fuzz and 75% overdrive without the need to mess around with knobs.
It seems that Stone Deaf really understands the player’s desire to have tons of control over their pedals, because the Kliptonite also contains extensive expression pedal functions similar to the Fig Fumb and the PDF-2. Plug in an expression pedal for frequency control sweep for both the fuzz and overdrive channels, as well as wah and phaser expression capabilities.
Stone Deaf FX