The Blackout Effectors Musket fuzz is touted as a highly-tweakable take on the classic Big Muff stomp offering controls to enable the end-user to apply a clean boost, scoop out the mids and/or limit the amount of bass in the signal among other things. The pedal along with its sister stomp, the Fix’d Fuzz, is hand-built in Vancouver, Canada by pedalsmith Kyle Tompkins. There have been many iterations of Muff clone hit the market, but the promise of so much control over the signal made WTDP? very interested in taking a closer look at the Musket and its potential fire power.

The Musket fuzz comes to you in the standard boutique plain white box decorated with both a Blackout Effectors sticker and a stick of the Canadian flag. Our test Musket is the black sparkle ‘rifle and mountains’ deco’d version – there also a more limited ‘rifles and red’ version that is currently discontinued. Our Musket is serial #009. Unboxing the stomp, you find the pedal itself housed in a MXR-sized enclosure and a fold-out reference and owners manual that offers solid descriptions of the knob controls and their functions as well as offering a template for you to mark down your favorite Musket settings. It also lets you in on one bummer of the Musket. No battery control. The Musket runs solely on DC power supply. It’s not a dead breaker, but I know several players that love the effects a fading 9V can have on their tone, especially when it comes to fuzzes. Blackout defends their ‘no battery’ choice as an environmental-friendly one.

The Musket has six control knobs – Pre, Mids, Focus, Fuzz, Tone and Vol. Pre controls a built-in clean boost on the front end, which adds tone shaping possibilities. The Mids knob can be tweaked to run from a hard mid-scoop to total flat response and all points in between. Focus controls bass input at the front of the fuzz circuit. Fuzz adjusts the levels of gain and sustain. Tone is a standard low-pass/high-pass tone control. Lastly, Vol is your output level.

Aiming the Musket for sweet tones is no sweat. Going for a single coil growl, I dialed in the Musket with Pre at 3 o’clock, Mids at 3 o’clock, Focus at noon, Fuzz at noon, Tone around noon and Vol at 2 o’clock. Using the Strat, bridge pick-up… listen to the results. Clean first, then the Musket.

The Musket brings a beefy sounds to the single coils, which sent my hopes skyward for what it would do with the humbuckers of the Les Paul. With a few knob tweaks – Pre at 10 o’clock, Mids at 10 o’clock, Focus at 3 o’clock, Fuzz dimed, Tone at 3 o’clock and Vol still around 2 o’clock – listen to the the Musket bring the Muff-ness to this quick lead riff. Clean tone first, then the pedal.

I might use the word ‘versatile’ too much in my reviews, but if the shoe fits… and it does for the Musket fuzz. One could serious post two dozen plus sound clips from this pedal and none would sound the same. Think of this pedal as a Big Muff with a set of top notch controls that open up a whole new realm of tonal possibilities. One slight word of caution, as you may have gathered from the number of knobs on the Musket, this is a tweaker’s pedal. You may need a little patience dialing it in to your liking. That said, you may find yourself hard pressed to find a tone that resides within this stomp that you don’t like… it’s a monster. That’s our take anyway… your mileage may vary.

PLEASE NOTE: All YMMV Review clips are played through a Reverend Hellhound 40/60 combo amp with 1×12 extension cab. No reverb or other effects were added to the clips. Guitars used in this review include a 1979 Gibson Les Paul Custom and a 1998 Fender American Deluxe Stratocaster.