Orange Amplification is best known for making, well, amplifiers. But recently they have struck out into the wide world of effects pedals with real success, first with a compressor (the Kongpressor which we reviewed), the Two Stroke clean boost, and now the Fur Coat fuzz and the Getaway Driver overdrive pedal (review coming this week!).
The Fur Coat is a fuzz pedal that has a very handy feature – a footswitchable Octave effect. The Octavia type sound has been a staple in fuzz since the beginning, and many pedals have it in the sound to some degree, but often it’s simply in there, with no way to adjust the level or turn it on or off. The Fur Coat has both. This offers a level of flexibility in your fuzz-ing that you don’t get in many fuzz pedals (trust me, I’ve tried A LOT of them). Some have more knobs for other things, but this specific parameter is rare.
The EQ knob on the Fur Coat has a broad sweep that gives you lots of very usable tones. You might think, well, shouldn’t they all be usable? But in my experience, most fuzz pedals have a couple spots in the EQ or Tone knob sweep that work and the rest is just terrible. But the Fur Coat EQ seems to be pretty well dialed in so it sounds nice (I’m not sure nice is what people are looking for in fuzz, but you know what I mean) in most positions.
There are many fuzz pedals on the market, and there are many kinds of fuzz sounds available. But the Orange Amps Fur Coat presents us with an instantly likable, highly functional option for a pretty reasonable price ($155 street) that holds its own against the legion of boutique builders and fuzz scientists out there.
