The Berko Fuzz (Foxey Lady)...

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As you probably know by now, the history of Electro Harmonix goes all the way back to the late 60's, with a pedal that collector nerds have dubbed the "AUL Fuzz" or the "AUL Foxey Lady". And while this story has been told and retold for decades, there are a few incorrect and even untold pieces of the puzzle that I think are worth exploring.

As the narrative goes, William (Bill) Berko had his own electronics shop, ABCO Sound, in Manhattan on 48th Street in the mid-60s (which would have put him directly in the center of Music Row, among stores like Sam Ash and Manny's Music). Having previously (and then later again) worked at the Ampeg factory in New Jersey, Berko was very familiar with the technology of amplifiers, so this type of repair became his main occupation. But in addition to amps, he would get visits from local guitar players who wanted to modify or fix their new fuzz tones. And this happened enough that it eventually drove him to start building his own fuzz boxes to sell directly out of the shop. 

What came next has two conflicting accounts (both from Mike Matthews 😂):

-Either; Berko contacted Mike because he was doing well selling his fuzzes and wanted some help. But unfortunately, Berko stepped away from both the shop and the new fuzz partnership almost immediately after it began. Leaving Mike in a most unfamiliar position, having to build fuzz boxes himself. So to remedy this problem Matthews went to a local large-scale electronics factory called AUL Instruments and contracted them to build the pedals instead. This new version of the fuzz began to do very well, and based on that success word got out to Guild Guitars owner Al Dronge, who made a deal with them to start supplying Guild with the newly dubbed "Foxey Lady" fuzzes. 

-Or; At some point before Matthews was involved, Berko connected with Dronge and agreed to build fuzzes for Guild directly, as they wanted to capitalize on the hot new trend as well. And faced with an order from a major guitar brand, and attempting to simultaneously run his repair shop, Berko reached out to Mike Matthews and proposed that the two go into business together building and expanding on his new fuzz box venture. Mike agreed, and took on the task even though he was still working full-time at IBM.

*side note; although it has been written differently over the years, it was actually Dronge who came up with the name "Foxey Lady".

The story comes back together here, where Mike states that he would drive out to AUL, pick up the orders and deliver them directly to the Guild factory in Hoboken, NJ every few weeks. He has also stated that the "Guild branded" versions were only brought to Guild and not sold directly to dealers. The implication here could explain the blank AUL units we typically see that have residue left over from what appears to be a Manny's Music sticker (*see first image above).

Well this is where the things start to get even more convoluted, as Guild apparently made a similar deal with Mosrite to also build their version of the Foxey Lady pedals, either concurrently with the deal Mike had or very shortly afterwards. It is unknown why this happened, but the most common theory is that Mike was simply unable to keep up with the orders that Guild had requested.

This would not turn out to be a great decision though, as Mosrite had run into financial troubles, and by 1969 went bankrupt. In the meantime, Mike had decided to go all-in on guitar effects and started Electro Harmonix with engineer Bob Myer in the Fall of 1968. Shortly afterwards he picked up where he left off with Guild, and began producing the Foxey Lady pedals with EHX.

So that's it! That's the story we all know and love, and not just for the history of the Foxey Lady fuzz, but also for the genesis of Electro Harmonix. But if you were reading through all of that and had tons of questions; yeah! me too! But the one I want to focus on today goes back to the very beginning, where everyone just glosses over the fact that Bill Berko was building fuzz pedals and selling them out of his shop. 

This means that there were/are, somewhere out there, pre-Guild, pre-AUL, pre-Mike Matthews, Berko Fuzz boxes! This idea has my collector brain going crazy. Was it the same circuit as the Foxey Lady fuzz? What did it look like? Did it have some kind of label on it? Was it called the "ABCO Sound Fuzz", or a ridiculous hyperbolic 60s name like, "Berko's Wild Fractured Sound Box" or something? I have so many questions.

If we are at the complete speculation part of this article, then let me throw out a guess that it WAS the same modified Fuzzrite circuit. And if it is the same, then all we would have to do is find a really old looking, seemingly home-made pedal, with a silicon Fuzzrite-ish circuit in it. And MAYBE, just MAYBE, this could be an original Berko Fuzz???

So be on the lookout friends! And who knows, YOU might have potential fuzzy gold just sitting in a box in your basement at this very moment. 

There are plenty of other points about this story that I want to touch on in later posts; like the possible reason Berko just disappeared shortly after teaming up with Mike, the potential sequence of Foxey Lady builds, Berko working for Ampeg and the possible connection to the Manny's Fuzz, and so much more. But for now, just let it sink in that somewhere out there is an unknown fuzz box that was essentially the beginning of Electro Harmonix, and no one has ever seen it before...

thanks for reading!
-ed

Ace Tone FM-2 Fuzz Master - A Deep Dive

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In the late 2000's my pedal hoarding was getting a bit out of hand, and it was time to make a change. So I decided to pair down the collection and go for only pedals that were obscure or typically harder to find. And while that was great for freeing up closet space, it did cause me to skip right over some historically significant pedals that I've had to go back and acquire over the last couple of years (and for 5X the price). 

One of these was the Ace Tone FM-2 Fuzz Master. Built by the thousands, I was always more drawn to its significantly rarer brothers, the FM-1 and FM-3. But over the last couple of years as I starting digging deeper into the true history of the Super Fuzz, the FM-2 kept coming up as one of the earliest "copies" to exist. 

So now that I finally landed my first Ace Tone FM-2, I decided it was time to put together a post with all the info I have collected, and hopefully we can smash our brains together and fill in the missing pieces...

For as long as I've known about the FM-2, I have seen a production date range from roughly 1969-1971. So the first thing I wanted to do was confirm how true (or not) that was.

1969 would have put the FM-2 right there with the Royal Fuzz Box as one of the first commercially available Super Fuzz copies . And we do know that there was an Ace Tone FM-3 that's a Big Muff copy, so 1971 is certainly plausible as an ending date.

All we have to do now, is prove it!

So to the magazine and newspaper archives we went, and in not much time, we had the answer:

The first mention I found of the FM-2 came out of this ad from the Vancouver Sun, May 1968. And I know what you might be thinking, "It only says 'Fuzz Masters', that could mean anything in 1968!", and I thought that as well. So I went through a decade's worth of ads from the same newspaper and not only found an ad from the previous year that just said "Fuzz Master", which would have been the FM-1, but also found an ad from 1971 that included a photo of an FM-2.

The other bit of information to notice here is that it also includes the "Wah Master", which Ace Tone released at the same time as the FM-2.

But I totally understand if you're still not convinced, so what about this:

From the June 1968 issue of Music Trades magazine, we get a full page ad for all of the new Ace Tone products, including the Wah Master and the FM-2 Fuzz Master!

Interestingly, what is not in the picture, is the Ace Tone FM-1. And if they did discontinue it by June of 1968, that would mean just about a year's worth of production time. But we'll dig more into that at some point in the future.

In addition to this ad, I found 4 more from 1968, all confirming that the Ace Tone FM-2 Fuzz Master was available that early! Which puts it as not only the first known Super Fuzz copy, but May of 1968 is also the (estimated) date that Univox began to sell the Super Fuzz themselves!

Ok so now we have a pretty solid start date for the FM-2, but what about that end date? There are tons of these out there, which would either mean that Ace Tone was making them by the thousands for just a handful of years, or they made them for much longer than that original 3 year period we all thought.

Luckily the internet provided yet again, as many of the 70s era Ace Tone catalogs are available through various sites. So starting at 1971 I went through each year until the FM-2 was gone, and it took until 1975 to find its final entry. Which, as you may have guessed, is also the first time Ace Electronics introduced the world to the devastatingly heavy FM-3 Fuzz Master.

So at the very least, we can assume that they were selling the FM-2 until 1975. They may have stopped building them earlier (or later) as well. But either way, our newly discovered production run of 1968-1975 makes a bit more sense when you consider the shear number of FM-2's in the vintage guitar pedal world.

Well a nearly 8 year run should mean that there are differences in how the FM-2 was built during that time. As we saw in our last post on how to date a Super Fuzz/ FY-6, there were plenty of indicators of "era" both in and outside the pedals. So would this also ring true with the FM-2?

Unfortunately, after examining hundreds of them, I can't find one single difference in the enclosures, at all. Ace Tone seemed to really have this part of the process down from day 1. Every logo, sticker, knob, bottom plate, and even the rubber feet were all identical from pedal to pedal.

So I had to look inward.

The only (big) problem, was that Ace Tone built the FM-2 so that the component-side of the board is facing away from us; and not only that, but one of the foot switches is soldered almost directly to the PCB. And all of this is to say, that in the hundreds of examples I have looked through, only 3 owners were brave enough to disassemble their pedals and take that precious gut shot.

But it's ok, for now we can work with what we do have.

When looking inside the FM-2 there are a couple of things that immediately stand out as possible differences to help us create a timeline. The first is the On/Off pot. As you can see above there are two colors that were used; Red and Black. The red was my first potential clue, because it happens to be the same On/Off pot that they used in the Ace Tone FM-1 from the previous year.

*and a side note, but these pots are conveniently dated. So this FM-1 is at most "June of 1967" years old.

Sadly anything we can glean from comparing both pedals ends here. And while it doesn't necessarily equate to the Red Pot FM-2's being first, it's not something to just overlook either.

Ok, so now look back at the comparison photo above, and another thing you may notice is the difference between the two Black On/Off pots, in that they appear to be two different brands with different labeling.

The next clue is that weird stereo jack that you see in the upper two examples. If for no other reason, it may help us establish an order; so if the red pot is first, that would make the black pot with the weird stereo jack second, and the other black pot with the plastic jacks last. But again, for now this is just all a guess!

Alright, let's zoom in a bit for the next observation:

Something that you may have missed above is what's going on over at the second pot. Through each example we see a mixture of date stamp/no date stamp, a single resistor/no resistor, and a ceramic capacitor/a film capacitor. 

The first pedal with the red pot appears to have a date stamp of June 1968, while the next pedal has no visible date stamp at all, and the third pedal has a stamp that says "831D" that I'm not too sure what to make of (31st month of 1968?). I also noticed that all three pots appear to be from different manufacturers, and the third pot is a totally different value from the other two. I would guess this could potentially be related to that missing resistor?

So again, none of these details on their own will tell us how old or the order that they were released, but I feel like it is getting us closer! So let's take a look at the trace-side of the PCB next and see what we can find there (...this is where it gets weird).

When we take a closer look at the PCB's used in the FM-2 throughout its run, they all seem to be exactly the same. What is not the same however, is the wiring. 

Above are the three variations I was able to find just within the Red Pot units alone. I am definitely not versed in any kind of electronics, so I couldn't tell you what would cause something like this, especially in a circuit that should theoretically be identical from pedal to pedal. 

And while our photos don't help much in determining what is going on, we might as well point it out here for future dissection. 

Next is the Black Pot version. I only found two variations here, but there definitely could be more. 

When looking at these, I wonder if there was any real rhyme or reason to it all? I also wonder if it has any correspondence to a timeline, or am I just wasting everyone's energy with this part... 😁  

And lastly, the Plastic Jacks version gets a whopping four variations! And again, I can only speculate what any of it means. 

What I can say is that it does seem odd, knowing that the rest of Ace Tone's output appears to be very streamlined. Even the fact that they never updated the enclosure make the wiring variances all the more strange.

But who knows! It could easily be something that my tiny non-engineering brain can't pick up on.

Well at this point there is only one way to proceed, and that is to turn the board over and take a look at what's going on inside.

 

Let's start with the only circuit photos that had been available online for over a decade. This comes from the classic Uzzfay Fuzz Guts site. The version here is a Black Pot with the type of wiring seen in the top-left photo above.

The first thing that sticks out to me is that it uses silicon clipping diodes, as opposed to germanium like the Super Fuzz/ Baby Crying/ FY-6. 

Next, this particular unit runs off of five 2SC369 transistors, as opposed to the six transistors that you find in any Super Fuzz, including the Royal Fuzz.

Another thing that jumps out to me, is the rest of the component brands and styles seem to match up perfectly with ones you will find in an FM-1 Fuzz Master. So it's possible that this particular unit is somewhat early on in the run?

The next gut shot comes to us from our good friends at Soulman Vintage. This unit is a Plastic Jacks version and has a completely different mixture of transistors; four 2SC733's and a single CDC13000. 

We can also see that it uses different cap and diode brands from the previous unit. So I am curious how, or if, any of that affects the tone at all?

But let's take a look at another Plastic Jacks version and see if there's any more variances we can spot.

For the third available gut shot, we have this interesting unit from longtime friend of the blog, Humphrey Barclay. 

Again I am drawn to the transistors, but after messaging him I have confirmed that they are the same exact mixture as the unit above.

The clipping diodes though, do appear to be a third brand and possible value, but still silicon. 

Alright, finally we have a pair of photos from my personal pedal! I decided to bite the bullet and brave the task of taking it apart. And amazingly, I seem to have broken my longstanding curse of accidentally messing up everything I touch.

The very first thing I noticed was that it used a combination of three 2SC369 and two 2SC372 transistors. Unfortunately I don't have access to any other photos of a Red Pot unit, but this transistor combo appears to be as unique as the others.

Another thing that stands out is that it uses a different type of silicon diode. Instead of the glass versions, it uses two black plastic clipping diodes, similar to what you would find on the original Jordan Bosstone from 1966. 

Both pots date to July of 1968, but I have seen them as early as March of that year, although again this doesn't necessarily correspond to when they were made.

For the last entry, I put together this comparison of all four boards. Each one has the same set of open slots in the PCB at the top left, and the upper right side. But there are some differences for sure.

The upper two images are from the Plastic Jacks versions, and at first glance they look the same. But when I went component to component, there was one big difference, and that would be the large blue cap on the bottom right! In the first photo it's not there at all, and in the second photo it's very much present.

If we continue on to the photo right below, we notice again that the cap is there on the bottom right, but appears to be smaller (and probably a lesser value). Additionally we also see a gray cap directly under the large green film capacitor that is not present at all in the Plastic Jacks versions. From what I understand, the missing cap on the bottom portion has more to do with power regulation, and might not be totally necessary for the actual fuzzing going on. But this other missing cap does affect the overall gain. And I will say, that from demos I have heard, there are some with a discernable difference from my personal pedal. And I wonder if this is the culprit...

As for the odd open slots on the PCB, that was a fairly common practice in Japan at this time and throughout the 70s. Pedals like the Ibanez Standard Fuzz, the Guyatone FS-6, and the Aria Distortion Sustainer all have similarly unused holes. There are even examples like the Yack YF-1 and YF-2, that used the same PCB even though the circuits themselves were completely different. Which I assume was some sort of cost/time cutting measure. 

Is it possible then that Ace Tone had another fuzz pedal in the works that utilized the board layout differently? Or is there some completely unrelated piece of Ace Tone gear that uses this exact PCB for a different purpose and I've just never noticed? Possibly their Wah Master, something from one of their drum machines, or even this board from their Echo Mixer...

For the sake of not sounding completely ignorant, we'll move back to the outside of the FM-2 and focus on things that I can clearly observe with my own eyes. 😊 

A handful of examples out there have the serial number sticker still intact. What actually drew me to buying the one that I did was the fact that it actually had a serial sticker WITH the earliest serial number I have ever seen!

If the order of the numbers correspond to the order they were made, then it appears as though my assumptive timeline could be correct!

So look back at the photo above, the lowest number 60969 is a Red Pot version. The next sticker, 62877 is a Black Pot version. The sticker with 72373 has yet to be seen internally, but the 74876 unit is definitely a Plastic Jacks version. And finally we come to the odd one out; a completely different sticker with the Multivox name on it and the number 888. This particular unit has pot date codes from Fall of 1974, so it is very possible that by this time they were changing small details like serial number stickers.

*I promise we're almost done here. I applaud any of you who have read this far!

Well as I dug a bit more I came across this little Ace Tone brochure and price list from 1971. And one thing immediately jumped out as odd. 

Do you see it?

So on both sheets the FM-2 is not referred to as the "Fuzz Master", but instead the "Brazz Master"!

What's going on here? Well this paperwork comes from Sorkin, who was their North American distro. So it's possible that they just got a bad translation from Japan, and printed it. But there is a 1968 Sorkin ad where they clearly label the pedal as the "Fuzz Master".

And while I honestly have no idea why there was an apparent name change, one thing I do know is that in 1970 Shin-ei released the Companion FY-6 Fuzz Master. So is it possible Sorkin renamed the pedal on their order forms just to avoid confusion? Maybe they distributed both effects and were worried that some small Midwest shop owners couldn't tell the difference? Who knows! But I thought that was a cool little piece of the puzzle to throw in here.

*I know we're going way long on this one, and halfway through I even thought that I probably should have just made this a video instead, but here we are. And I promise we're about to wrap up.

As is with many of the Japanese effects from the 60s, we sadly do not know who designed this circuit. There are rumors that an engineer who had worked for Honey left the company to join Ace Tone and brought with him the Baby Crying Fuzz schematic; which ultimately lead to the creation of the Fuzz Master FM-2! And while that sounds like 2008 Harmony Central forum lore, there is actually a pretty compelling quote from the founder of Ace Tone, Ikutaro Kakehashi, published in the May 2003 issue of Guitar Magazine: 

"The person who designed for Honey later joined Ace-Tone and Roland, so I've heard about that, but Honey added an edge to the distorted sound and differentiated it... in other words, it was a circuit that suppressed the low range and emphasized the middle to upper range sounds, and it was a new kind of sound at the time."

He went on to note that the FM-2 is NOT simply a copy of the Baby Crying Fuzz though, just that this same engineer designed both circuits.

Well as you can see, there is a lot we do know about the FM-2, but also quite a bit we do not! So as always this is where I will ask if any of you have additional information, or if you feel so inclined to send me more gut shots, I would be forever grateful! Please message me via Email or Instagram.

In addition to everyone mentioned above, I also want to send a huge Thank YOU! to Nick from the great Fuzzboxes.org, Bart from FXDB, and fellow vintage collector and great guy, SirHC, who have all been a huge help with this research.

Thanks for reading,

-ed