I fell in love with the original Big Muff Pi in the early nineties when I learned Nirvana used it on a few tracks to record Nevermind with Butch Vig. For whatever reason over the years I let that sound slip away until just recently when I saw Jack White use one plugged into a homemade one string guitar made out of a piece of wood, a pickup, and a coke bottle in the movie "It Might Get Loud". He played some slide guitar riff on that one string and made it look and sound so easy- It was then that I decided I had to get back to it.
Since then i've learned the Big Muff Pi has been around almost 40 years, used on Hendrix, Santana, Pink Floyd, Smashing Pumpkins, Soundgarden, Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr., NIN, Manson, and the list goes on and on- The Muff has many sisters and cousins as well such as the Metal Muff and Double Muff. I've tried these in stores but never really found the need-
For the past year i've been upgrading my sounds and found a used muff for $45. I love it as my lead channel distortion- it screams! A permanent fixture on my pedalboard it goes into channel 2 of my '65 Twin Reissue. It sustains for days and crunches all the way to hell-
When I heard about an upgraded version coming out it took me time to get around to it. I liked that the footprint was reduced with the Little Big Muff Pi, but that still wasn't enough to grab me. It needed to have something the old one did not do, enter the Big Muff with Tone Wicker. It has the smaller footprint, all the same controls as the original plus 2 tone shaping switches.
Got it home and plugged into my rig with a single coils strat first. I started with all knobs at noon on both pedals. When A/B'ed they sound pretty close to the same, when I started moving knobs around I noticed the original muff has a low mid sponginess that the wicker muff does not. How can this be? I thought they were the same circuit? Well it still sounded close so I kept playing around.
Next I tried the switches- When you flick off the left switch it cuts off the tone knob and boosts the gain like 10db! Kind a cool but honestly the level change was too drastic to be able to do anything with live. Next the wicker circuit, which is a super treble boost kind of like cranking only the highs on an eq pedal. This also did not work for me- way to drastic a change. On single coils the noise and hiss was crazy-
At this point I switched guitars over to my axe w/ dual humbuckers. It was then that I found what the wicker does more clearly. The tone off switch was still too drastic but the wicker was ok. I played around with settings and found the same issue with the low-mid sponginess it just sounds better to me on the original. The Wicker version is a close copy and the wicker switch does add a new Muff dimension, but I still like the original the best-
Pros- smaller footprint
Cons- tone and wicker switches too drastic- wicker no good on single coils-
I like having options and having the tone shapers is cool, but for me the original Big Muff Pi is the way to go-
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