British Audio Engineering – Royaltone pedal
BAE Royaltone © 2018
v1.0
Page 3
Fuzz LEVEL pot controls
both
. You can add as much tone and fuzz as you like –
you can reduce the output level without reducing the tone and fuzz. You may or
may not hear fuzz at this point – that will be influenced by your guitar and
amplifier settings.
It is useful to remember that there are three places where gain and
overload/distortion/fuzz can be affected: the guitar volume and tone
controls, the pedal controls, and the amplifier controls. By realizing this and
setting your controls to work together, you can achieve the greatest
variation in tone with minimal further adjustments to all your controls.
Once you’ve dialed that in, it also allows you to invoke the effect of the
Royaltone by merely controlling your guitar level and touch.
Higher settings of the ATTACK and LEVEL will generate more fuzz into the
amplifier. You will be hearing overload generated by the ROYALTONE itself AND
possibly amplifier overload as well (depending on settings).
Play with the controls to see how they affect your tone.
When using both the Tone Stack and the Fuzz sections, you will find that any
of the tone controls, in combination with the ATTACK control will give you
excellent, and many different FUZZ results. Increasing the BASS will achieve a
warm, sweet fuzz. MID and TREBLE controls will provide cut-through tone with
sharper fuzz. As you get closer to the extreme max of the controls, you are
supplying very high gain and chronic fuzz, so be careful! With the LEVEL control,
you can achieve all this at lower volumes, if desired.
The images on the next page will give you an idea of what the Royaltone’s fuzz
actually look like. Figure 1 shows a softer, warm fuzz, that matches many of the
vintage Germanium boxes. Clipping is on one side only, with some phase
distortion as well. Figure 2 shows the same input signal with significantly more
ATTACK, resulting in a sharper, cutting fuzz tone. Top clipping is much broader,
and now there is also bottom clipping with phase shift as well. Both signals aree
an identical 200 Hz sine wave. Actual guitar tones would be much richer and
more complex due to the many harmonics generated.
