Review: Full Custom Music Barnacle Fuzz

The Barnacle Fuzz is an original design fuzz pedal from Full Custom Music. It's a very well rounded fuzz taking influence from a few famous fuzz designs. Keep reading to find out more about this awesome new fuzz box and the tone and simplicity it can bring to your pedal collection.

Hardware

The Barnacle Fuzz has an understated appearance, nothing flashy, but it looks professional inside and out. Everything feels just right. It can be run off of a 9V battery or power supply. It has four controls for volume, fuzz, bass and treble. I felt it offered plenty of control, while still remaining simple enough to avoid excessive tweaking. Another cool feature the Barnacle possesses is it's ability to be switched from true bypass mode to a buffered output mode. The buffer mode is great for those of you out there with long signal chains to prevent signal degradation. Overall it's a very solid pedal, that's very well thought-out and appears very durable. I wish it had top mounted input/output jacks and power plug, but that's far from a deal breaker.

The Sounds
The Barnacle Fuzz definitely has it's own distinctive sound, and I like it a lot. The EQ allows for plenty of tonal options but the pedal always holds on to it's distinct tone and texture. Even with the treble cranked, it's a very thick fuzz, just a great wall of sound. This thing packs plenty of fuzz for all you high-gain whores (myself included) and really retains clarity no matter if you have it cranked or barely turned up. The EQ is very balanced and uninvasive if you want it to be. With the knobs set to 12 o'clock, the tone controls are basically bypassed (which means this fuzz is will work equally well on bass as it does on guitar). My favorite thing to do with this fuzz was crank the gain all the way up and add a healthy dose of bass to my signal for some great doom tones. I also loved rolling back the bass and adding some treble for some cutting rock tones. Listen to the clips and you'll see what I'm talking about.


Barnacle Low Gain by Mike Fetting
Here the Barnacle has the treble boosted with the gain rolled back to 9 o'clock.
Barnacle Rock by Mike Fetting
Here's a great balanced, fuzzy, rock tone with the gain set to 12 o'clock.
Barnacle Stoner Rock by Mike Fetting
A thick stoner rock tone with a slight bass boost and the gain set to 3 o'clock.
BarnacleDoom by Mike Fetting
Here is the Barnacle at it's heaviest. The bass is cranked to 3 o'clock and the gain is maxed out. My personal favorite.

Final Verdict
I think the Barnacle Fuzz is simply awesome, it has it's own distinct tone and I just love the wall of fuzz it is able to produce along with it's intuitive tone controls. The switchable buffer is also a great addition. It's priced very reasonably and most importantly it sounds damn good for whatever kind of music you play from doom and metal to all sorts of different types rock/pop. I had never heard of the Barnacle before it was sent to me to review and it really surprised me blew me away, definitely worthy of any fuzz collection.

To find more info on this awesome fuzz and Full Custom Music, visit their Homepage.