Since the fuzz effect was invented in the early sixties, guitar players have gone to great lengths to achieve the perfect fuzz tone. Legends say Duane Allman placed his fuzz pedal in the freezer to cool down the transistors, and Roger Mayer meticulously modified Hendrix’s Fuzz Faces in search of a magical fuzz experience. Apart from these mythological methods, one trick that always works is using a dying battery. Fuzz circuits are highly sensitive to voltage changes, resulting in drastically different tones. Guitarists drained batteries to find the sweet spot for their fuzz pedals, but this was impractical.

Enter the Volture, a modern device for vintage fuzz circuits. Simply place it between your power supply and pedal to precisely trim the input voltage, perfectly replicating the tone of a dying battery. As the song says, “Power is made by power being taken.”

Though developed for vintage fuzz circuits, the Volture works with any fully analog pedal, revealing unique sounds in overdrive or distortion effects. The Volture allows you to input 9, 12, or 18VDC and output an adjustable voltage from 7.5VDC down to 1.25VDC, creating gated, distorted, glitchy, and sputtery fuzz sounds. It uses 10mA in addition to the power when active and should be used with pedals drawing less than 50mA. Input and output voltages are center negative, with input ranging from 9VDC to 18VDC and output from 1.25VDC to 7.5VDC.