The secret of Fuzz?

Question

I was chatting with a fellow bass player about my new line-up of effects pedals which my last gig enabled/required, and I commented that I had a "black rat fuzz" and when she looked at it she said, "oh, it's a rat clone! That's kinda more of a distortion."

Intrigued I investigated the subject of Fuzz, and apparently it all began with a happy accident in the recording of a Country Song called Don't Worry. Where the channel on the recording console had something gone bad in it.

Marty Robbins, Don't Worry

This very same broken console circuit was used in the followup hit, The Fuzz.

Grady Martin, The Fuzz

Therefore, every Fuzz box is a clone of that original effect. Are there any pedals or units which are directly copied from the actual breakage of that original circuit? What happened in the change from 1 Fuzz to many Fuzzes? Who made the first clone and how did they do it?

Answer 1

https://thehub.musiciansfriend.com/tech-tips/how-electric-guitars-got-their-fuzz-on describes that incident as follows:

Another documented early fuzz bass sound also grew out of a malfunction. During a 1960 Nashville recording session with country-pop singer Marty Robbins, a transformer blew in the tube-driven Langevin recording console, giving bassist Grady Martin a thick layer of hair on his bassline for the forgettable ballad, “Don’t Worry.” Engineer Glenn Snoddy was intrigued by the accidental effect and set about trying to replicate it without disabling a circuit in his mixing desk. Snoddy tinkered with solid-state circuits exploiting the germanium transistor’s tendency to spew out strange, distorted tones.

In 1962 Snoddy sold his circuit design to Gibson who then began producing what is commonly thought to be the first commercially available effects pedal, the Maestro FZ1-A Fuzz Tone...

It sounds to me like the Maestro Fuzz Tone is the closest thing there is to something directly inspired by that particular console.

Answer 2

I'm familiar with the track you mention on Don't Worry, and it did precede the story I heard about the Fuzz pedal. The story I was told was that Vox developed the Fuzz pedal in an attempt to make a guitar sound like a Sax, and was shown to Keith Richard at the time of the recording sessions for " I can't get no Satisfaction". I heard that many loudspeakers were shredded in an attempt to duplicate that sound by budding guitar players back in the mid-sixties. I suppose both stories could be true, but I can't say for sure.