Rainger FX: RAZOR FUZZ

After our recent work on the Death By Audio/Rainger FX ‘Amp Crash’, David was nice enough to offer us the chance to try one of Rainger’s own pedals, I took the chance to request something I’d have some knowledge on but with some left field take, which when looking through the current lineup and what was available, the Razor Fuzz seemed to offer:

“The Razor Fuzz is an intense, spitty, gated fuzzbox, with a ‘virtual plectrum’ facility; choose which one of four virtual plectrums you’d like to use!”

‘Just to note from the outset, while i was trying this pedal I had the ‘EXTRA’ switch pushed in, I preferred the sound of the fuzz being heavier and with more push but after trying it without later in the video it seemed to interact better with the single coil neck, I’m not sure if it was really needed or was just to taste, just something to remember should you try/buy one.’

So before engaging more actively with the ‘virtual plectrum factory’ side of the pedal, i tested out the bare fuzz sound, I’m a big fan of weirdy, glitchy, gated, velcro fuzzes and personally had a great time riffing on big droney, doomy riffs which it zipped through with the a rippy, tight velcro sounding fuzz, had me playing some fun psychedelic leads. Extremes to both sides of the tone give either a big bump in either Bass or Treble, keeping EQ’ing a preferred tone relatively easy to locate in the broad sweep.

Between this and the Volume control, the fuzz tone is responsive, tight and has a pretty solid amount of control given the simplicity of 2 knobs, the sound itself does some very heavy lifting for me as it doesn’t just sound like a similar setup vintage fuzz pedal, this fuzz section has a diverse range.

But here we begin to analyse the extra feature, the “virtual plectrums”.

Clanging or Banging depends wholly on what you want.

I find there are some effects i’m not too well versed in or styles such as droney, ambient, pedal focused sorts of building soundscapes which is stylistically i haven’t worked on in a little bit, something which this side of this pedal could be fun to explore or it may be something you might not see a need for.

I’ll rarely say that a pedal is useless because I couldn't find utility in it myself, after being a fan of Nick Reinhart for a while and after seeing and trying strange tricks with conventional pedals, then it’s hard to write off something unconventional because it could become the secret sauce for someone else!

-Sandpaper mode gives you control over white noise blasts which resemble kielbasa (shakers), after some time with this mode I found it fun to try to use it as backing percussion with varying levels of success but could absolutely see this being used for some crazy percussive singer songwriter show.

You can also use it to layer up with the fuzz tone to be more spitty and scratchy sounding with some heavy rhythmic blasts.

-Metal mode introduces a set rhythmic metallic beeping sequence which changes speed dynamically to your playing, these tones can’t be tuned and will be random in pitch so would lend themselves more to being for textural players with heavy delay? Could see it serving those “pedal for a songs sound”, kind of slots.

-Metal Long is similar to the latter sound but with a longer, more aggressive pinging, industrial tone.

-1 Note differs from the others as it has its own separate pitch control so can be tuned and used for a specific pedal note, as well as having some control whether it's a lower pitch or higher pitch which can help you thicken/sharpen your tone depending on your usage.

Currently available at about £119 at the time of writing from Andertons online, it’s a pretty solid choice for an easy no nonsense 2 control fuzz with some extra textural bits that you can mess about with here and there if that isn’t exactly your thing. OR that's exactly your thing and not only are you getting a pretty nice fuzz pedal with the additional depth of a noise maker attached to explore and maybe incorporate into your future compositions, give it a listen through some demos on youtube (or some sound clips we’ll have done soon!).

I enjoyed the time spent with it and thanks again to David for sending it over and trusting us to do this write up and for his contributions to the crazier side of the pedal industry!

Words and thoughts by Josh G (He/him)