Billy’s Muff did not have the tone bypass, and you don’t get his sound with the tone circuit bypassed. He had his tone set around 1:00 on the V4, though it sounds more like 11:00 on a typical V3 or V6. I don’t get much use out of the bypass, but it does make a huge sound when you use it!

Perhaps you owned a bad one? They really don’t sound “that” different from the V3 Muffs.

Too many, but if I had to pick one I always enjoy listening to it would be Sir David Gilmour.

It’s called sound-on-sound, and you need a delay with a separate 100% wet output jack and a volume pedal.

Gilmour had a 1500ms delay with repeats set for about 20 seconds on his Roland SDE 3000, going into a volume pedal. The repeats from the delay (100% wet, nothing but the delayed signal) went to a separate Fender amp. The non delayed signal went to another amp so David could play the melody stuff over the sustained chords in the delay loop.

Gilmour plays a chord, swells the volume pedal up for a second or two to get the repeats going, then back to zero to play the solo stuff over that looped chord.

There are a lot of delays that do 100% wet. I think the Deluxe Memory Man does it, and most boss delays do it. By 100% wet, I mean there is a separate output for just the delayed signal with no dry signal at all, so all you hear is the echo through that jack.

You could send both both the dry signal and the wet back to the same amp if you had one with two inputs, or you could send the wet signal out in a loop, then then mix both the dry and the wet signals back together with a mix pedal just before they hit the amp.

As always, very interesting read Ron. Thanks.

I don’t agree that modern Muffs sound like crap compared to vintage ones. I like them all, but they ARE different guys. All Big Muffs have that distinct diode clipped sound to them, but there were MANY intentional component value changes to the Muff circuit by EH for the various versions that altered the sound. Just look at the schematics if you don’t have access to the different versions to hear it. Some were subtle changes, some were not, but they were intentional. I assume EHX thought they were improvements, or just mods to keep up with current trends in sound perhaps.

Several value changes were made to the Sovteks also, and the same is happening with the current USA Muffs. Fran Blanche was the person responsible for the 2000 reissue Big Muff, the V9. She was directed by Mike Matthews to revamp the circuit. They had no intention of copying exactly any previous circuit. There have been a few changes to the V9 circuit since then, and then another circuit version was made for the Little Big Muff. Now we have the Tone Wicker version. Hopefully we will continue to see other changes in the future. It keeps Big Muffs interesting.