Sometimes simple wins. Ten years ago Strymon CEO and analog engineer Gregg Stock built a few custom fuzzes in an afternoon as a way of clearing his head, and they’ve been gathering dust on a shelf ever since. Unearthed seven years later when we needed a fuzz to pair with our UltraViolet vibe, that rediscovery became the catalyst for the creation of our new Series A line of all-analog pedals.

Now we’re pleased to announce the arrival of Canoga, a tweaked version of a vintage silicon FuzzFace® based upon one of Gregg’s original three fuzz designs. Full up it works as a fuzz or distortion, but if you back the guitar’s volume down there’s a world of varied tones on tap for all different styles of music.

Canoga is a simple pedal to use – there’s one knob for Drive and one for output Level – but the interaction between the guitar and Canoga’s input is critical, as is the interaction between it and your amp.

As with many fuzz pedals, Canoga works brilliantly plugged into an amp with a bit of hair on the tone already, similar to how Jimi Hendrix and other guitar greats of the 60s and 70s ran their rigs.

Additional versatility comes from the interaction between your guitar’s volume knob and the pedal’s input. 

Traditionally, unbuffered fuzz pedals like to be connected directly to your guitar, so that the circuitry can “see” your guitar’s pickups and volume pot. Full up on both of Canoga’s pots and your guitar volume pot gets you the full fuzz experience, and rolling back the volume on the guitar opens up a new world of semi-clean blues, rock, Americana and pop sounds. 

The rolled back sound stays clear in the high frequencies and doesn’t get muddy, so you might find that Canoga allows you to convincingly play riffs that you would normally employ a distortion pedal for, not a fuzz.