Not just a fuzz pedal. A midrange restoration tool that does what Gilmour's secret weapon did — warms up scooped fuzz tones, adds harmonic richness, and stacks perfectly. Rooted in a rare 70s British boost circuit, rebuilt with switchable 9/18V headroom and smooth gain control.
Everyone knows Gilmour used a scooped silicon fuzz and a dark germanium fuzz. What most people miss is what came after them in the chain — a rare British boost that wasn't acting as fuzz at all. It was solving a problem.
The silicon fuzz is scooped. The germanium fuzz is dark. Both are brilliant but both cut mids. Live, in a band mix, that tone disappears. So Gilmour ran them into a midrange-forward boost downstream to restore what the fuzz had taken away.
Classic fuzz pedals shape tone aggressively:
You can't just turn them up louder. You need to restore the frequencies that cut through without losing the character of the fuzz.
He didn't replace the fuzz. He fixed it downstream:
That's the trick. The boost wasn't a standalone tone. It was a midrange restoration and harmonic enrichment tool that made everything before it work in context.
The original circuit had an abrupt transition — clean boost, then suddenly full fuzz with very little middle ground. The Ace of Spades smooths that out into three musical zones you can move between gradually.
Clean headroom push. Transparent EQ shaping. No dirt of its own — just adds mids and warmth to whatever's in front of it.
Use case: Stack after a scooped fuzz to restore body and cut without changing the fuzz character. The Gilmour move.
Gentle saturation. Still adding body and mids, but now contributing harmonic content of its own. This is the new accessible zone — the smooth transition makes it repeatable and musical.
Use case: Standalone overdrive with forward mids, or stacked for thicker harmonic layering.
Aggressive, bold, midrange-present fuzz. Can work standalone or stacked. The "Sheep" character — cutting, forward, unapologetic.
Use case: Standalone fuzz with more mids than scooped silicon circuits, or pushed even harder for lead tones that sit on top of everything.
The original circuit jumped abruptly from clean to fuzz. That made the stacking sweet spot — where you're adding warmth without adding aggression — hard to find and harder to repeat.
The Ace smooths it out. You can dial in exactly how much "warming up" you want, stop right there, and trust it'll be the same next time. That's what makes it useful as a tone-shaping tool, not just another fuzz.
It started with a question: how does Gilmour get those sounds? The answer was a rabbit hole.
Almost all of his original tone came from circuits that had gone obsolete. The rare British boost he loved — his all-time favorite pedal — wasn't in production. But someone had a schematic.
So one was built. Then modded. Then modded again. The Ace of Spades came out the other side — something rooted in that original circuit but pushed into new territory with switchable headroom, a proper
So one was built. Then modded. Then modded again. The Ace of Spades came out the other side — something rooted in that original circuit but pushed into new territory with switchable headroom and a smooth gain taper that makes the stacking sweet spot repeatable.
It's not a clone. It's inspired by that circuit — but refined, improved, and built for the way people actually use these pedals today.