The Chthonic Fuzz (pronounced: THAH-nik) creates fat, corpulent, fudgy, sludgy, fuzz tones designed to pair perfectly with single-coil, P90, gold-foil, and DeArmond style pickups. It also works great with PAF-style humbuckers, but this fuzz was designed with brighter guitars and bright, clean amps in mind.
Starting with a beloved single-knob ‘70’s fuzz circuit, we experimented with adding a subtle tone control (Lustre), and then a separate gain control (Fuzz). This yielded a simple yet powerful fuzz with an earthy, dark flavor. Straight-up transistor clipping using a pair of 2N2222 transistors allows guitar volume knob clean-up similar to other classic fuzzes, but the Chthonic comes from a different dimension. Think of it as a kind of classic fuzz from an alternate universe.
The Chthonic’s Kraken/Cthulhu graphics are courtesy of the same artist that did the Carcosa Fuzz art. The Chthonic is a psychotic dizygotic dark companion to the Carcosa Fuzz that takes its place in the pantheon of the underworld.