Mike Matthews Talks About The Big Muff

I'll always have a soft spot for the Big Muff pedal. 

It was, after all, the first pedal I played through that, to my adolescent ears, gave me a decent facsimile of the Jimi Hendrix sound at bedroom levels. 

Bear in mind that this was the era of behemoth non-master volume tube amps that simply refused to distort at anything less than tooth filling-loosening volume levels.  And those new fangled transistor amps (gasp!) had yet to get their act together -- they sounded better on paper in the guitar magazine ads than they did up close and personal. 

Fortuitously, Electro Harmonix Big Muff came along just as my musical tastes were gravitating toward the flavors of the psychedelic '60s.  If I wanted my guitar to distort and sustain like Jimi's on Love Or Confusion, the humble Big Muff was just a footswitch-tap away.

In this vid Mike Matthews -- hail, oh great one! -- talks about the origins of the Big Muff and its predecessor the Muff Fuzz, mentioning how he came up with the name because he thought it sounded 'muffled'.  I guess it dawned on Mike a little later to add the Pi after Muff, giving the Big Muff Pi a whole new meaning.  Nudge, nudge.. wink, wink..