"Football? What's a football?"
"Ah, there it is: Russo Music – and Arena Drive, just how I remember it. And there I am with that dumb, round face and that stupid stocking cap. But no matter, the holidays were here. First-nighters, packed earmuff-to-earmuff, jostled in wonderment before a tinkling display of mechanized, electronic joy. Wow, there it is. The holy grail of gifts: The Electronic Audio Experiments Glaive Op Amp Fuzz. And there he is: The EAE Duelist himself. In his hand was the rounded rod of as deadly-looking a piece of weaponry as I ever had laid my eyes on. My fevered brain seethed with the effort of trying to come up with the infinitely subtle devices necessary to implant the Electronic Audio Experiments Glaive indelibly into my parents' subconscious."
"For weeks, I had been scheming to get my mitts on one of those fearsome, silver-steel beauties. My old man would never go for it. This is the story of one holiday season and my quest for such a mythical op amp fuzz."
This is the Electronic Audio Experiments Glaive.
Enter the Op Amp
Introducing the Electronic Audio Experiments Glaive Fuzz
Let's talk about fuzz. If you're not up-to-speed on your new fuzzes, this year has been pretty big for upgraded, high-fidelity fuzzes that break the mold for the classic effect archetype. Fuzzes aren't all just three-dial boxes of dirt that won't shut up if you leave them on and don't turn your guitar down anymore. They've certainly evolved in plenty of places.
Enter Electronic Audio Experiments and their Glaive Op Amp Fuzz. The bad boys from Boston, as it were*, Electronic Audio Experiments have made themselves known for a number of awesome distortion devices that cover plenty of different dirty bases. You get amp-style distortions like the Model feT, transistor overdrives like the Halberd, JFET preamps like the Citadel – take a look around EAE's catalog and you're sure to feel spoiled for choices before long.
No one else is using that, right?
Amp-style drives and preamps are all well and good, but what about some true distorted debauchery? We're in luck with their Glaive fuzz. Specifically designed and touted as their most dastardly drive effect, the Glaive is an analog op amp-style fuzz with mountains of sound to move and plenty of hi-fi ways to shape it all to your liking. Usually when it comes to heavy fuzzes, the last thing you're expecting is the kind of close, modern control you get with other kinds of effects that really elevates the experience and reduces the headaches. The Glaive is here to change that. Let's talk about it.
Glaive, Baby, Glaive
Electronic Audio Experiments Glaive Fuzz Design and Tones
At the center of the Glaive is a monstrous op amp fuzz. Op amp fuzzes, for a refresher, lean into that "Pi" sort of persuasion with really buzzy, fuzzy, sustaining, and effervescent characters to fill a room and drown a signal. Op amp fuzzes are not normally for the faint of heart – and that's part of what makes them so beloved. In any case, the Glaive's op amp design couples with a heaping dose of gain. How much exactly?
EAE isn't kidding around when they talk about the gain on tap with the Glaive. Capable of outputting over eighty decibels of gain, the Glaive starts loud and ends loud. Once you've got your op amp flame fierce, you shape it as you see fit with plenty of effective controls. Let's start at the start with some basics.
Electronic Audio Experiments Glaive Fuzz Controls
- Level – Square one, we've got Level to harness the output of the entire pedal. With Level, you're let in pretty quickly on how much water is behind that dam, so to say, so really tread lightly when you first fire the Glaive up – eighty decibels is quite a few decibels.
- Fuzz – Here, we're controlling the amount of distortion in the signal. Clockwise for more, counterclockwise for less, the Fuzz control ramps up to truly staggering levels of fuzz near higher settings.
- Weight – Part of what makes the Glaive so playable is its handling of high and low frequencies. We get a taste of this with the Weight control which increases or decreases an onboard high-pass filter that cuts out lower frequencies gradually. This will prove pretty influential later.
- Texture – Probably the secret (or not so secret) weapon of the Glaive is its simultaneous octave-up circuit. Texture controls the presence of this octave-up as it gets more noticeable, nasally, and nasty towards its max setting. The octave-up effect in this pedal definitely lends credence to its hype as a dirty, disastrous fuzz, so keep that in mind.
Electronic Audio Experiments Glaive Fuzz Tones
With these four controls, the Glaive treats us to a massive helping of cantankerous, op amp fuzz. Like we said, eighty decibels is a lot of gain and you'll certainly be on no shortage of fuzz, so where do we go from there? Throughout these four controls, the Glaive runs the gamut from a powerful, crispy drive to really give your Mesa a shove to an enveloping wonderland of fuzz all its own. The tones in question are undeniably heavy with interesting, distorted character to soak your signal and sustain near indefinitely.
Your '70s-style blues rock riffs? Covered. Your '90s alt rock walls of sound? Solved. Your twenty-first century metal doom and gloom? Child's play. The Glaive is an incredibly expressive op amp fuzz to meet you anywhere you're imagining a drowning deluge of fuzz. With the Glaive, you get a deeply sculpted op amp fuzz with the capacity for disastrous, cutting octave overtones. Play it safe or otherwise and the Glaive delivers in droves.
Cutting Through the Noise
Electronic Audio Experiments Glaive Fuzz Further Functions
We carry on with the Glaive and we get let in on some of the smaller considerations and functions that truly put it over the edge. Onboard, two three-way switches offer new angles on op amp fuzz shaping to fit more modern playing sensibilities. Let's run these down.
- High-Cut – Matching up with the Weight dial, the Glaive features a low-pass frequency toggle that works on a three-level basis, shaping high-end frequencies. Either cutting high or low frequencies, the Glaive can sharpen or smooth itself to best suit whatever other pieces are in your rig.
- Bias/Gate – On the second switch, "Squelch," the Glaive offers an enormously helpful hand in its playability. You can find bias and gate controls on a good couple modern fuzzes these days. However, you probably won't find a gate as effective as the Glaive's. At its highest setting, the Glaive gets quiet – real quiet – when on but not played, uncharacteristically but thankfully so for a fuzz this loud, heavy, and dirty.
- Intelligent Switching – Something newer for a high-gain fuzz, EAE introduces an intelligent footswitch that allows for momentary engagement and on-the-fly bursts of fuzz through a soft-touch, silent footswitch.
Dropping in with very board-friendly designs like silent, buffered bypass and standard nine-volt center negative power operation, the Glaive is incredibly modern as it dishes out a titanic distortion just like so many classic circuits throughout the decades while keeping things clean and airtight in terms of playability.
Electronic Audio Experiments Glaive Fuzz Final Thoughts
Electronic Audio Experiments is always pushing the envelope. When we're talking about EAE and their drives, distortions, and fuzzes, we've been instilled confidence in their tangible and audible design. EAE can do both: New, exciting sounds and reliable builds. That's not nothing, you know. It's especially something worth noting when discussing specifically high-gain fuzzes. Such fuzzes can slip out of hand pretty quickly considering issues of reliability, fidelity, and doing someone else's thing over again instead of doing something all your own for the first time. None of these problems are present here. Electronic Audio Experiments nails it in so many ways for high-gain fuzz fans. Cut that cake, share some slices. Rejoice in a fuzz so sharp and slick.
