Fender and Kevin Shields have resurrected Shields’ mythical 1970’s fuzz and injected a subversive feature set, creating the all-new Fender Shields Blender. On the heels of the successful June launch of the sold-out Kevin Shields LE Pedal, the Fender Shields Blender retails for $299.99.
Throughout the late ‘80s and ‘90s, Shields awakened iconic sonic walls of fuzz like the world had never heard as has defined the tone of alternative rock, inspiring the ‘shoegaze’ genre and beyond, most notably with his band’s seminal record Loveless, an album that catapulted My Bloody Valentine into a commercial success. The pedal represents the revival of a classic Fender fuzz circuit from the 1970s and serves as the new penchant for the effects pedal category, which has been reimagined through a collaborative four-year development process with Kevin Shields.
Standout specs include:
- Classic design: Designed around Kevin Shield’s original Fender® Blender circuit, with his added tweaks, the Fender® Shields Blender adds an octave-up push button to toggle the original octave-up fuzz voice on and off, unlocking all-new vintage fuzz tones.
- Two footswitchable channels: The Octave Footswitch toggles between two channels of fuzz. Channel one blends the fuzz voice with the original clean signal. Channel two removes the clean signal and instead blends the fuzz with a monophonic sub octave fuzz.
- Blendable fuzz: Use the Volume and Blend knobs to set the right balance of clean and fuzz signals to create unique crisp tones, then use the Fuzz and Octave knobs to craft the right mix of dual, or triple, octave fuzz.
- Reactive sag circuit: The revolutionary sag circuit uses dynamic sensing circuitry to create imploding fuzz tones. By starving the transistors of power relative to the picking intensity used by the player, you can harness controlled chaos like no other fuzz.
