Z.Vex Effects is an effects pedal company based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Their name derives from the name of founder Zachary Vex, a respected innovator in the business, described by some as a mad scientist.
The company's most famous product is the Fuzz Factory. All of their pedals (except the budget-line Vextron series) are hand painted at their factory in Minnesota. All Vextron subassemblies are made in Taiwan, but the final assembly is completed in the United States.
The basis for the Fuzz Factory is a traditional fuzz effect circuit using New old stock Germanium Transistors, as used on the Fuzz Face, the seminal device used by Jimi Hendrix and many others during the late 1960s/early 1970s. The Fuzz Factory innovates by use of internal feedback loops and component-level bias adjustments to achieve unprecedented control, or deliberate lack thereof, of the distorted signal. Designed by electronic trial-and-error, closely tied to circuit bending, the controls of the Fuzz Factory are highly interactive, and represent a wide spectrum of tonal ability, often extending into self-oscillation and noise. Many musicians find the promise of near-infinite new sounds and textures inherent to the device to be inspiring to their music, and the Fuzz Factory has a well-known following among professional guitarists.
The Factory has 5 knobs, 2 of which are only suggestions of what parameter(s) they actually control. From left to right:
Volume: output level Gate: transistor bias Compression: transistor bias Drive: input level Stability: supply voltageEach unit is handpainted, and while there is a stock design that adorns most models of the pedal, there have been several variations released in limited quantity, including sparkle finishes, kanji finishes (writing and labelling of controls are in Japanese kanji characters), Korean finishes (all controls labelled in Korean), and so on. These limited runs of custom paintjobs underscore the handmade, one-of-a-kind nature of the devices. From the earliest incarnations of the device in the mid-1990s, Jason Myrold painted all Fuzz Factories leaving the Z.Vex shop. Briefly during the mid-2000s the artist Laura Bennett assumed painting duties.
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