Walrus Audio has completed the triumvirate of its Five-State multi-voiced dirt pedals with the Eons fuzz. Doing what the Eras did for the distortion pedal, and the Ages does for the overdrive, the Eons houses five fuzzes in one enclosure and gives players heaps of control over them.
Options when it comes to dirt pedals is a great idea, but especially with a fuzz pedal. There can be no more subjective guitar effect.
Here, the Eons Five-State Fuzz not only gives you five fuzz types to choose from but gives you a voltage control knob – marked with a lightning bolt because of course – that allows you to run them super open and uncompressed up to 18V, or to send your electric guitar tone into gated, sputtery submission, choking the voltage at 3V to replicate the dying battery effect.
But before you start playing around with the lightning knob, let’s run through the fuzz types. There is something for everyone here.
Selectable as per the Five-States house style (i.e. five-way rotary dial) we have a soft-clipping silicon fuzz in Mode 1, ready and capable for all those big-sounding, compressed fuzz sounds. Mode 2 takes this silicon clipping and gives it some heft in the bottom end, a bass boost that feeds some heft into its “compressed and crunchy” voicing.
Mode 3, meanwhile, presents the heady whiff of germanium before the transistor sniffers among you, and immediately suggests a dynamic performance that should work well with your picking dynamics and behave a little more like a distortion – or, as Walrus put it, “what if a distortion and a fuzz had a kid?”
Mode 4 offers LED clipping diodes with a high-end cut. Described as “dynamically dark” this sounds like it could work nicely in taking the edge of something bright, like a Telecaster bridge pickup, though there are EQ options to help this play nicely with all kinds of electric guitar pickups.
Finally Mode 5 is the kitchen sink mode, with hard-clipping silicon transistors teaming up with LED and silicon soft-clipping diodes for what Walrus calls “the rowdiest” of the modes, “compressed, loud and angry”.
Other controls include Volume, active boost/cut Bass and Treble dials, and Gain. Other features? Well, it’s got a big, ol’ cloven-hoof beast on the front of the pedal. Just feed it a minimum of 100mA via a 9V DC pedalboard power supply and it’ll be as nice as pie.
The Eons Five-States Fuzz is out now, priced £235 / €269 / $229. See Walrus Audio for more details.
