galen tipton's Love Letter to Fuzz
Under her given name or her alias recovery girl, Ohio native galen tipton has released on Orange Milk Records, Deskpop, and Unseelie, working with everyone from experimental music giants such as Giant Claw & Holly Waxwing, to underground pop icons like Lil Mariko & GFOTY. As a sound designer she’s worked with Adult Swim, Team Rolfes, and a number of Splice packs including ‘brain scratches’ on the Moment label.
Across all her work, the focus is on finding the connective tissue between the challenging and the accessible, always with a strong sense of play. In her latest installment for Moment, galen’s sonic obsession has sent her deep down the rabbit hole of fuzz.
What are the origins of your fuzz fascination?
Distorted guitar music was my first love and used to be the only thing I listened to. In fact until I started getting into producing electronic music you would rarely catch me listening to anything else.
Recently deciding to take my production style a bit more “out of the box” and more analogue has allowed me to reconnect with this love of distortion and heavier music through fuzz pedals and introduce me to a whole other set of metal and rock music that I hadn’t given a fair shake back in the day.
Young me was obsessed with the “djent” tone of Meshuggah and the crushing riffs and breakdowns of any number of late 00's deathcore bands. The current me is obsessed with finding the gnarliest fuzz imaginable and enjoying a good groove from Electric Wizard.
Your packs so far have been all-digital sound design. What led you to make a pack like this?
This pack started as a passion project to fill a void in my sample library. While there are countless examples of electric guitars and basses running through fuzz pedals, finding electronic content running through fuzz was much rarer, and as royalty free samples almost non-existent. Electronic drums and bass run through fuzz pedals create some of the most gnarly and satisfying sounds I've ever listened to, and I wanted to share that with producers.
What attracts me to the sounds of analog fuzz is its unpredictable textural nature that is extremely difficult to exactly replicate digitally. Yes digital distortion is capable of any sound we can imagine and more, but the imperfections of analog distortion along with the inherent tactile nature of it fit perfectly into my workflow; one where improvisation, mistakes and chance lead to the best results.
Importantly, the specific distortion of fuzz elicits an ASMR response in me and as an artist who creates work consistently drawing from the ASMR realm, exploring the sensory nature of distortion just made sense.
So, what pedals did you use?
This is by no means a quintessential collection of all fuzz sounds as there are literally thousands of fuzz pedals out there, simply the ones I love the most. These are the pedals and sounds that elicit the deepest responses in me edited down to the most useful samples for producers of any genre.
List of pedals:
- Discordance Electric - Bumble Stick Doom Buzz Dual Heavy Octave Fuzz
- Third Man x Mantic - Mantic Flex Fuzz/PLL
- Defects - Blasting Booster/Multiswitching Fuzz
- Adventure Audio - Dream Reaper Modulated Fuzz
- Lefa Pedals - Gangbang Orgy Parallel Destruction
- Lefa Pedals - 4M14NTO Nuclear Bass Fuzz
- Catalinbread - Antichthon Oscillating Fuzz
- Subdecay - Harmonic Antagonizer Fuzz/Oscillator
- RML - Electron Fuzz Pedal
Click the button below and check out the FUZZ! a galen tipton moment sample pack today!
