Heather Brown Electronicals WET Fuzz

Heather Brown’s take on the Russian Big Muff, the fuzz that helped start it all for her.

Heather Brown spent her formative years in pedals working for Mike Matthews at Electro-Harmonix and later for Robert Keeley, so it makes a lot of sense that one of the circuits closest to her heart is the Russian-built Big Muff, the “bubble font” version that so many players came to know through the ’90s and that still has a devoted following today. The WET is her tribute to that sound, built in the same spirit of personal touches and careful voicing that we have come to love in her Blessed Mother and Sensation Fuzzdrive pedals.

The controls are the familiar Muff trio of Tone, Sustain, and Volume, which means you can sit down with the WET and be dialed in within a minute, whether you are after a thick, woolly rhythm wall or a singing lead that holds a note as long as you want it to. Inside, Heather builds the gain structure around Fairchild BC547A transistors along with Zener and silicon diodes, and the result has the heft and low-end push that makes the Russian Muffs so beloved, while the all-analog signal path keeps the noise floor low enough that the pedal stays quiet when you are not playing.

Heather also added a couple of practical touches that make the WET easy to live with on a modern board. You can choose between true bypass and buffered bypass by holding down the footswitch, with the LED telling you where you landed, a slow pulse for buffered and a fast flash for true bypass, so you can set it to suit your cable runs and the rest of your chain without opening anything up. The soft-touch footswitch is silent, so there is no pop when you kick it on mid-song, and the pedal runs on a standard 9V DC supply.