Cream Fluff Fuzz

The Fuzzdog Cream Fluff Fuzz pedal. Our best understanding is that this is a workalike of the Frantone Cream Puff Fuzz. We ended picking up the PCB for this pedal - not necessarily because we weren't open to the possibility of buying a Frantone pedal (we were - we don't support complete clones except in a few cases), but because we were under the impression in 2016, when we originally bought it, that Frantone wasn't going to be making it (or any other pedal) any more. It had fallen off of Frantone's production line, didn't have a webpage for ordering, and the Frantone website looked like it was possibly, even likely, ending production of all pedals. So we bought the Cream Fluff Fuzz PCB from Fuzzdog. Yes, we bought only the PCB. When shipping from abroad, we're only going to buy the bare minimum we need to buy. Why pay for overseas shipping of transistors, resistors, and capacitors we can source here, right?

At any rate, Frantone ended up making updates to the website in 2017. That having been said, once Frantone updated, it wasn't an ongoing effort. As of the writing of this article (December 2, 2018), it would seem that Fran Blanche, the owner of Frantone, hasn't updated the website, since it was last dated in © copyright March 2017. Checking again now at the beginning of 2019, the Frantone website has a total of 19 different pedal models displayed. Of those 19, 15 of those models have their own product pages. Buying a pedal is possible on only 3 of them.

It appears she's a one-woman operation with limited bandwidth. It's cool. We get it, given our understanding of the nature of the pedal business. But that said, and just so long as we understand that the number of parts we count in the Fuzzdog clone (we haven't opened an actual Frantone), we have a hard time agreeing that $300.00 (ok, $295.00) is a reasonable price for a pedal that's a $10.00 enclosure with about $20.00-$30.00 worth of parts. Yes - there are the hours spend breadboarding. Yes, there are the hours spent seeking out and ordering parts, yes there's the time spent designing and sending the PCB out for fabrication. Yes, there's the time spend enameling enclosures and assembling the electronics for the pedals. We're actually very sympathetic to all that. We just don't know that we're $300.00 worth of sympathetic. At least Frantone's are original designs, so we hold her efforts in infinitely higher esteem than, say, the ZVex Super-Hard-On.

Controls

• Knob 1 - "Fuzz": Turning the knob clockwise increases the amount of fuzz present in the signal.
• Knob 2 - "Tone": Turning the knob clockwise increases the volume of the treble frequencies in the signal.
• Knob 3 - "Volume": Turn clockwise to increase the the output volume of the pedal.
• Footswitch 1 - "On/Off": This footswitch toggles between "Active" and "Bypass".

The Cream Fluff Fuzz is sort of a different than other Fuzz tone pedals. If the pedal is engaged with the fuzz turned all the way down, there will be less fuzz, yes, but the treble will also be lower. As the fuzz control gets turned up, more higher-level harmonics get added to the signal, thereby increasing the treble response. So this pedal architecture makes the tone control very interactive with the fuzz control. Of course, this can also be observed from time to time with amplifiers and other pedals, but this degree of tone change and control interactivity isn't something we've seen with other pedals.

Bypass: True

Like most pedals assembled from only PCBs, the Fuzzdog Cream Fluff Fuzz is True Bypass.

General Information

In our opinion, this is really a fantastic sounding pedal. When the controls are set just so, the pedal can sound like a beautiful, harmonically rich, thick fuzz.It's perhaps not unlike a low-RPM / high torque buzzsaw with a blade that's just-a-little-bit-less-than-super-sharp, ripping through a stack of 2x4s with reckless abandon. It can also be set so it sounds like a 1960s fuzzed-out guitar coming through a crappy old transistor radio with a cheap 2-inch speaker, and set to an AM radio station.

When you really have time to get into exploring the sonic possibilities, one of the things we find really remarkable is the "girth" of the distortion even with single-coil pickups. Maybe the Frantone Cream Puff Fuzz is actually worth $300.00 (ok, $295.00)?

Pedal Manual

We are unaware of any kind of Pedal Manual for this pedal.

Frantone offers no Owner's Manual for this pedal.

Fuzzdog offers a Build Manual, but not an Owner's Manual. Outside of these authorities, we believe that this wiki entry is likely the closest an individual can get to a Pedal Manual.

Phase Inversion:Yes/No

Schematic ID	Electronic Part	Action	Phase State
X	X	X	X

Artists

We are currently unaware of any artists actively using the pedal now, or who have in the past.

---

Additional Sources