Shigehuru Germanium

Germanium Octave Fuzz

You’ve been hearing about it for years, but now it’s center stage.
“GERMANIUM: It’s so hot right now!” (Even though it really shouldn’t be as it’s a temperature sensitive material)

Somehow, someway the 32nd element on the periodic table has suddenly become the magical difference maker of the audio path, the most desirable flavor of oat milk, and the guitar pedal version of cerulean from The Devil Wears Prada. And yes, although there are circuits and applications where germanium parts would make no difference whatsoever other than hype, the semiconductors made from this material can and will sound different in the right recipe. Two things can be true at the same time:
there can be hype, and it can be warranted.

So while it would have been easy enough for us to say “voila! We have substituted these germanium parts for the perfectly functioning silicon ones for more ‘authentic’ tones. Now give us money as we ride this trend” that just would not have been good enough for us or for you.

So in addition to the parallel octave circuit of the Shigeharu getting a bit more of a *woody* texture and sound from some new old stock Soviet parts we used, we also tweaked each of the transistor gain stages to more closely resemble one of our old

bubble-font Soviet era fuzzstortions in our reference lab. The end result is still PLENTY of gain – I mean, good lord, you should know us by now, right? – but more wooly, a bit more low end, and a bit more bark and a little less bite than our standard Shigeharu. There’s still an incredible range of overdriven, distorted, and all out fuzzy sounds here and – while we still can! – these are hand-wired at our workshop in Columbia, S.C.

We can make em in limited batches, but if you want more, we’ll give the people what they want.