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Mar 12, 2024

My Bloody Valentine's Kevin Shields announces signature Fender Blender fuzz pedal

My Bloody Valentine have finally announced…a fuzz pedal! Specifically it’s the limited edition Fender Shields Blender, a recreation of classic Fender Blender distortion pedal that Kevin Shield first

My Bloody Valentine have finally announced…a fuzz pedal! Specifically it’s the limited edition Fender Shields Blender, a recreation of classic Fender Blender distortion pedal that Kevin Shield first used on My Bloody Valentine’s 1987 single “You Made Me Realise” and he says was instrumental in in the song’s iconic, very noisy sound which would shape the rest of the band’s music. It’s available now for $499.

The pedal originally hit the market in 1968 and stayed in production through the mid-’70s. It was rediscovered in the ’90s by guitarists like Shields and Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan. Fender reissued the Fender Blender in the mid-2000 but Shields noticed that the tone in one of the effects didn’t sound like his vintage pedal, and had them base his new signature edition on his pedal’s circuit board. Here’s more from Fender:

At its core, the Fender Shields Blender echoes the tone of Shield’s own vintage 1970s Fender Blender, thanks to carefully hand tracing the circuit from his personal fuzz box. Built around this vintage circuit are entirely new ways of controlling and blending the original fuzz voice, all crafted with performance in mind utilizing four easy-access foot-switches. Two foot-switchable channels of fuzz, each with dedicated level controls, offer the ability to blend the fuzz voice with your clean signal or to blend the fuzz voice with a beefy sub-octave fuzz, while the sag foot-switch introduces sputtering and ducking effects like never before heard, all controlled by the intensity of your playing dynamics.

“I really enjoyed the experience,” said Kevin Shields of working with Fender. “I’ve been using it a lot recently in the studio, it’s been great, I’m looking forward to hearing how other people use it It’s kind of pretty extreme but also very interesting when it’s set up in a subtle way.”

For more on what this $500 pedal can do, watch a video with Kevin where he talks about and demos it below.

As Kevin said, he’s been using his new pedal in the studio which means he’s working on something. Maybe that long-promised new MBV record. Stay tuned