# Do you use a battery or DC adapter for your Fuzz boxes?



## zurn (Oct 21, 2009)

Some purists only use batteries in certain pedals like fuzz boxes, could you really hear a difference in a blindfold test?


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## Sneaky (Feb 14, 2006)

Some fuzz pedals only take batteries.

My general rule of thumb is if a pedal doesn't have an DC adapter plug and an LED I don't buy it. I have a few vintage pedals that only use batteries, but they rarely get used. Batteries are a pain.


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## KoskineN (Apr 19, 2007)

My real answer is both actually. I use DC adapter for SI fuzz like the MAXR Classic 108, Fulltone '70 or Skreddy Lunar module, but I only use batteries
for Germanium fuzzes like my Fulltone '69 or Soulbender. Ge fuzz seems to have more gain and fizziness when used with adapters to my ears. Zvex Fuzz Factory
sounds good with an adapter tought. I bought the special cable to power the '69 with the PP2+ of my pedalboard, but didn't like the tone at all, so back to batteries for this one.


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## keto (May 23, 2006)

When I build em, I put voltage sag knobs on lots of fuzzes. Not so important on a Big Muff style, much moreso on a Fuzz Face style, whether sil or germ.


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## zurn (Oct 21, 2009)

Can the sag knobs on the PP2 do the same thing?


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## mhammer (Nov 30, 2007)

Mystique mystique mystique.

A battery is not a battery is not a battery. Different types of batteries have different current-delivery capabilities, and those capabilities also vary with age. In part, that is a function of their physical construction. Take an alkaline apart, and you'll see what amounts to a string of sub-AAA batteries connected in series via a spot-welded metal strip. Take a carbon zinc battery apart and you'll see what looks like 6 "slugs" stacked atop each other. One of the quirks of carbon-zinc batteries, with their large surface area between the slugs, is that they can deliver short bursts of current when they start to run low, and then peter out; like a guy with a heart problem who can dash for the bus for maybe 25 yards, but who runs out of breath once he sits down. Alkalines, on the other hand, can deliver modest amounts of current at the rated voltage for a much longer time. The ability to deliver the current that the circuit calls for when applying large amounts of gain to a signal is what accounts for all "dying battery" phenomena and tone.

Most of the folk wisdom concerning "dying batteries" revolves around use of carbon-zinc types with certain (usually) germanium-transistor-based fuzzes. While many commercial power supplies now include "dying battery" features, they usually do not successfully mimic such batteries. The "sag" they offer is often just a stable downward adjustment of supply voltage. That reduction in supply voltage may well have an audible (and desirable) impact on the circuit, but it in no way captures what happens when a carbon-zinc that has dropped to 8v gives you a "dying gasp" i response to a power chord. In other words, the adjustment is static, not dynamic in the way that a battery would "behave". I strongly doubt you'll find the sorts of adjustment in such supplies that would provide the degree of tailoring of current that would feed-and-starve a fuzz the exact same way a battery does. Keep in mind that many such fuzzes may have fairly modest current requirements, and the supply is designed to be able to provide lots of current at every output so that it can support digital pedals and such.

Again, I cannot emphasize enough that you CAN sometimes get interesting alternate sounds from distortions (and here we're usually talking about discrete, rather than chip-based units) by reducing the supply voltage and/or starving them of current. But there IS a difference between the behaviour of a dying battery and the behaviour of a stable well-regulated current-rich supply that simply does what you tell it when you set it this way and that. Just as there is a difference between the behaviour of a pedal with a dying carbon-zinc vs alkaline or rechargeable Ni-Cad battery, or even a sextet of dying D-cells.


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## traynor_garnet (Feb 22, 2006)

For anything GE I use cheap-o dollar store batteries. I can hear a clear difference between a battery and power supply in these pedals. For SI and dirt pedals, I don't usually hear much of a difference so I use an adapter. Batteries are environmental hell, so I try to limit them whenever I can.

TG


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## Morkolo (Dec 9, 2010)

I was all for batteries until I bought a couple of Digitech compressor pedals, man those things eat them in a few hours. Now I run only DC if I can, no hassles of wondering if why my guitar sounds like crap is because of the battery.... it's because I suck


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## Jim DaddyO (Mar 20, 2009)

mhammer has some good points. I recall reading that Eric (golden ears) Johnson likes the old "black cat" style of batteries when they are just about used up. When I had my TS-9 I used an adjustable adapter and set it at 7.5 volts instead of the recommended 9 and it made it sound better to me. If you use pedals, and you see a universal adapter, grab one and try it.....cheap experiment.


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## bw66 (Dec 17, 2009)

mhammer said:


> Mystique mystique mystique.
> 
> A battery is not a battery is not a battery. Different types of batteries have different current-delivery capabilities, and those capabilities also vary with age. In part, that is a function of their physical construction. Take an alkaline apart, and you'll see what amounts to a string of sub-AAA batteries connected in series via a spot-welded metal strip. Take a carbon zinc battery apart and you'll see what looks like 6 "slugs" stacked atop each other. One of the quirks of carbon-zinc batteries, with their large surface area between the slugs, is that they can deliver short bursts of current when they start to run low, and then peter out; like a guy with a heart problem who can dash for the bus for maybe 25 yards, but who runs out of breath once he sits down. Alkalines, on the other hand, can deliver modest amounts of current at the rated voltage for a much longer time. The ability to deliver the current that the circuit calls for when applying large amounts of gain to a signal is what accounts for all "dying battery" phenomena and tone.
> 
> ...


Thanks for that. I'd heard that there are people who insisted on not just batteries, but certain types of batteries - but I've never had anyone explain it to me other than to simply say that the battery affects the sound.


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## bw66 (Dec 17, 2009)

Sorry, I somehow managed to double post.


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## mhammer (Nov 30, 2007)

bw66 said:


> Thanks for that. I'd heard that there are people who insisted on not just batteries, but certain types of batteries - but I've never had anyone explain it to me other than to simply say that the battery affects the sound.


You're welcome. I think the conceptual roadblock in the way many people think about this is to forget that a guitar signal is a dynamic event, with a particular time-frame, in which a large amount of energy is generated from the string for about 200msec, followed by a sharp decline.

Distortion pedals apply large amounts of gain to the signal, which will result in a brief burst of current demand from the battery during the initial transient peak. If the battery is able to handle all the current demand during that peak, you'll get a different sound than if the battery runs out of current-delivery capacity midway through that first 2/10 of a second. My own belief is that the desirable compressed fuzz sound people go after is precisely that "giving up midway".

The thing to remember is that batteries are often designed around a purpose, and the parameters of that purpose. So batteries aimed at a calculator, or radio, or flashlight, or digital camera, all have slightly different properties, and incorporate assumptions about constant current drain, instantaneous current delivery, lifespan at XXma current draw, and so on. The old red carbon-zinc Eveready battery was not likely designed in anticipation of fuzzboxes, nor was the Fuzz Face or any other circuit designed around a specific battery. But, it happens to be the case - and a happy accident - that the battery type brings out certain qualities in the circuit.

There are ways to "starve" a circuit of both voltage and/or current, but they are almost always non-dynamic in nature. That is, the current starvation remains fixed, and does not mimic the moment-of-feast-followed-by-famine tha dying batteries provide.


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## zurn (Oct 21, 2009)

Thanks mhammer, great explanations as usual!


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## zontar (Oct 25, 2007)

Sneaky said:


> Batteries are a pain.


Even taking into account what mhammer posted.

I like my pedals fine with an adapter.
Beats back when I burned though batteries.


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## CocoTone (Jan 22, 2006)

I guess it depends on how serious you are about your tone. GE fuzzes require carbon batteries for maximum tone. Period.

CT.


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## mhammer (Nov 30, 2007)

I'd dispute that. There are some things that GE fuzzes will do with carbon-zinc batteries in a particular state that they won't do with alkaline or other types, but if you have a fresh-out-of-the-wrapper 9v battery of any kind, there's no real difference. They all provide more than enough current-on-demand, and don't really start to tease apart until a ways on into their lifespan.

There are forks which are designed for eating escargots, and if one is eating them (escargots) those forks are _de rigeur_. But I would not want to eat a steak or salad or scrambled eggs or pie with those forks. If you find a use for a diminished carbon-zinc with your GE-based fuzz, great, but for the other 99% of potential uses, there's no sonic difference between batteries of any type and adaptors....well, not unless you include crapping out mid-set as a "sonic difference".


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## CocoTone (Jan 22, 2006)

I think , and the folks who build GE fuzzes will agree with me, that you are wrong. When I ordered my MJM London 10 years ago, it came with a carbon battery, and a not mentioning the use of said battery. Like I said,,,how serious are you about your tone?

CT.


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## pi39 (Jan 12, 2011)

I think the cheap dollar store batteries sound best in my fuzz pedals.


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## mhammer (Nov 30, 2007)

CocoTone said:


> I think , and the folks who build GE fuzzes will agree with me, that you are wrong. When I ordered my MJM London 10 years ago, it came with a carbon battery, and a not mentioning the use of said battery. Like I said,,,how serious are you about your tone?
> 
> CT.


Well, then we'll agree to disagree. Like I say, I'm not disputing that there is a point where carbon-zinc and alkaline part ways when it comes to GE fuzzes. I'm just saying that the parting of the ways does not begin when you crack the plastic on a fresh one, particularly if the pedals only draws a couple of milliamps, and the battery is capable of delivering much more. I wish I had an electronic copy of it, but there was a great article in Electronics Today about 25 years ago, showing the different current drain/delivery patterns of various battery types, and what you saw in the graph was that batteries start out the same initially in terms of what they can provide. The differences between them emerge over time. Unless MJM supplied you with an already used battery, or the pedal sucks 20ma+ under normal usage (faster battery drain) there should not have been any audible difference between any battery capable of providing the needed current at the needed voltage.

Note that I've also stated on other threads here that so-called "dying battery" mimicry on some power supplies does NOT faithfully mimic what happens to a dying carbon-zinc battery, precisely because it does not mimic the quirky way that carbon-zinc gives up its electrons after the internal resistance of the cells has increased. Yes, a carbon-zinc that has dwindled down to 8 volts makes a fuzz behave differently because of the change in internal state at that point, but a healthy power supply capable of delivering a robust 300ma at 8vdc is NOT a faithful emulation of a dying battery.

Companies will stick in, or insist on, lots of things because they don't feel like explaining things about power to customers. If they think it's easier to stick in a carbon-zinc that will eventually go dead-ish on you, rather than leave everything up to you, then that's what they'll do. It's not deception; it's just taking the easy route. That's why company after company says "Use OUR power supply only", even though there's thousands of perfectly acceptable inexpensive alternatives out there. They don't want to have to explain to customers of varying degrees of knowledge what to look for and how to avoid trouble, and they don't want to deal with the complaints and service issues if the customer has misunderstood. T'was ever thus.


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## blam (Feb 18, 2011)

Sneaky said:


> Some fuzz pedals only take batteries.
> 
> My general rule of thumb is if a pedal doesn't have an DC adapter plug and an LED I don't buy it. I have a few vintage pedals that only use batteries, but they rarely get used. Batteries are a pain.


I have a similar rule.

I have a Pedal Power Plus 2 or whatever it is called by voodoo labs that has a sag function if i so wish to use it. (i dont)


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## mhammer (Nov 30, 2007)

What may not have been brought up yet is something that may only very rarely apply.

Not all power supplies are created equal. Some can have a little more "ripple", while others can be virtually indistinguishable from a pure DC battery supply.

If the pedal in question provides very little, if any, gain (a chorus or phaser would be an example), then a little ripple in the supply is not an especially terrible thing.

Stick that same miniscule ripple into a pedal that amplifies everything by 300x or more, and that meagre little hum turns into a mufflerless Mack truck. So, if your power supply is not pristine, a battery can provide quieter power for a fuzz.


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## zerorez (Jul 4, 2008)

Interesting and by the other spectrum, there are many posts from those that have power supplies and they sometimes increase the standard pedal voltage of 9, to 12 or 18 for distortion and overdrive circuits and swear by the higher pumped up voltage, giving the pedal a unque sound from the stock suggested voltage setting.


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## mhammer (Nov 30, 2007)

...and there is nothing wrong with that either, providing the caps used in the pedal are up to the task (i.e., have a voltage rating that means they retain their specs well beyond the supply voltage used).

One needs to remember that distortion is essentially the outcome of a circuit designed imperfectly. The reason why there are so many thousands of different distortion pedals out there is because there is an infinity of ways to have a gain circuit work "wrong", and each of them produces slightly different harmonic content in response to the particular input signal.

Feeding a fuzz _less_ than its standard voltage and current requirements is certainly ne way to get the circuit to behave wrong, but there are many many others. 

And there is nothing magical about 9v, either. It just happens to be a convenient compact form factor. If 12v batteries were as widely available, I'm sure we'd have seen more pedals designed for 12v.


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## blam (Feb 18, 2011)

Sneaky said:


> Some fuzz pedals only take batteries.
> 
> My general rule of thumb is if a pedal doesn't have an DC adapter plug and an LED I don't buy it. I have a few vintage pedals that only use batteries, but they rarely get used. Batteries are a pain.


I am the same as you.

no DC, no LED, no buy.

the only exception is if I can easily add those items. my MXR phase 90 is the only pedal on my board sans LED (I added a DC)


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## mhammer (Nov 30, 2007)

There are a lot of pedals that can require a status LED to let you know the difference between on and off, because it is hard to tell. A compressor, an EQ, a clean booster, and a Noise Gate come to mind. Then there are pedals that, under gigging circumstances, can require an LED just to be sure. So, if you run your amp so that it has a little dirt to it, and you play loud-ish, you may need an LED to know if what you are hearing is ONLY the amp, or the product of amp+pedal. Same thing for reverb. Fuzz is one of those things I've never had trouble knowing if its on or off, unless we're talking about plugging into a true bypassed pedal, and you want to know up front if you are about to harm your hearing or not.

And with the advent of loop-selector units, where the status indication is for the loop, rather than any individual pedal in the loop, LEDS for individual pedals may be viewed as _less_ necessary, by those who know how everything is set up already, or _more_ necessary by those who might alter the deployment of various pedals within a loop before selecting the loop.


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## Arcane (Oct 14, 2012)

I prefer fully charged (9+V) carbon batteries in germanium fuzz pedals. I find the sound and particularly the feel is different with a carbon battery over DC. 

With most fuzz pedals a battery will last a very long time. 

Fuzz pedals tend to amplify the 'crap' in a power supply or a bad room and a battery minimizes that issue.

LEDs have their place but they are pretty useless with a fuzz pedal and they can certainly add more issues than they are worth. In many instances the LED will draw more current and drain the battery faster than the pedal's circuit. 

If you are having a hard time telling if your fuzz is on chances are you have bigger problems than a missing LED.


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## Mooh (Mar 7, 2007)

There's nothing worse than half disassembling my board to change a battery during set breaks. I don't hear enough change from one power source to another in a live situation to warrent battieries anyway...so it's wall warts into a power bar on the underside of my board. In a recording studio scenerio anything goes, anything and everything gets considered, but otherwise I use the most reliable power source.

Peace, Mooh.


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## loudtubeamps (Feb 2, 2012)

This pic is quite old, pedals are mounted in a guitar case. I don't run much in the way of pedals these days but when I did , I used a small 12 V gell cell.








A charge would last months and was dead quiet, especially on the wah which is very susceptible to any AC ripple.


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## mhammer (Nov 30, 2007)

Arcane said:


> I prefer fully charged (9+V) carbon batteries in germanium fuzz pedals. I find the sound and particularly the feel is different with a carbon battery over DC.
> 
> With most fuzz pedals a battery will last a very long time.
> 
> ...


The carbon-zinc/fuzz thing was most popularly brought to our collective attention by Eric Johnson. It is principally a function of the difference in how the internal resistance changes over time in carbon-zinc vs alkaline batteries. If you pull a 9v battery apart (which I do regularly, to make my own 9v battery clips), you'll see that alkalines are made of 6 sub-AAA batteries with a metal strip spot-welded to each cell, while carbon-zinc types are made of 6 flat slugs, stacked atop each other. For reasons stemming from both the internal chemistry, and the electro-physics of their internal connections, the two battery types start to differentiate as they get older. In particular, carbon-zinc types can supply a lot of current initially, in response to the pick attack, but peter out moments afterward, like a racer than can sprint like crazy for 20 yards but run out of breath after that, yielding a somewhat different effect on the dynamics of high-gain circuits than alkalines will...OR than either type will when fresh.

If an external power supply is extremely well-regulated, then one ought not to have any trepidation about using it to power a high-gain circuit. At the same time, there is a continuum of regulation, from appallingly poor to stunningly smooth/stable, with a lot of points in between. Given that they all say 9VDC on the outside of a sealed black box, it's not like you can tell how well-regulated they are, merely from looking at them, inspecting their insides, or relyng on what the manufacturer says. It is always possible to _improve_ on the smoothness of an external power supply, but not all that many players know how to do so. So, in the absence of either detailed information or ironclad guarantees from the wallwart maker, it is sensible for individual users to use batteries of one kind or another for high-gain devices, since you can vouch for batteries having zero ripple.



> There's nothing worse than half disassembling my board to change a battery during set breaks. I don't hear enough change from one power source to another in a live situation to warrent battieries anyway...so it's wall warts into a power bar on the underside of my board.


Myself and smarter minds than I have been advocating for years that players concerned about the audibility of hum in their external supply consider use of higher-capacity batteries. Loudtubeamps certainly has/had an elegant solution, but if you are either spooked by the purchase price of a higher-capacity gel cel or lead-acid battery, or mystified by their charging, it is a simple matter to get yourself some plastic battery holders and a sextet of C-cells or D-cells to form a high current-capacity 9VDC supply. Keep in mind that the current capacity, and lifespan, of the batteries will be a function of their size. A sextet of D-cells will likely provide the current capacity and lifespan of about a dozen 9V batteries, if not more. I suppose the other perk of a central battery supply is that you can leave all your pedals plugged into each other, and simply undo the main connection between the battery-pack and whatever you use to distribute power to the pedals. No removing pedals from the board, unscrewing anything, unplugging anything, or any of the other inconvenience that comes with individual batteries.

Of course, you will not be able to achieve the unique sound of an individual carbon-zinc battery dying in an individual fuzz, but quite frankly it's a bit like replicating an eclipse. It sounds wonderful when the planets align, but they can't be made to align the same way on stage all the time anyway.


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## loudtubeamps (Feb 2, 2012)

For the cost of a few premium 9 volts, u get one of these.
NP4-12 - ENERSYS - LEAD ACID BATTERY, 12V, 4AH | Newark/element14 Canada
Granted , size and weight may be an issue. There are alot of inexpensive , well filtered supply/adaptors out there now with hefty milliamp ratings.


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## Arcane (Oct 14, 2012)

I find Tone Bender variants in particular sound better with carbon batteries - the way I make them anyway.


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