Continuing on with our vintage French pedal features (see the Garen Distortion post here), today we're going to take a look at the Baby Fuzz / Distor Wha. As we mentioned in the last post, quite a while back we highlighted the mysterious Baby Fuzz. Once thought to be of Japanese origin, it turned out to be a French built Vox/Jen Distortion Booster copy from (most likely) 1970 or so. As of now it is the only one I have ever seen, and I thought it had the potential to be either homemade or some kind of local electronics shop kit. But a couple of years ago I came across photos of an odd fuzz/wah I had never seen before. I did however, immediately recognize the font and what it was called...
The Baby Fuzz apparently had a big sister called the "Distor Wha". And luckily for us about a year after discovering this existed, another one popped up online and we got even more photos.
After looking it over, it clearly uses many of the same components found in the Baby Fuzz, and even uses that same heavy grip tread. Additionally the font used on the input and output jacks "Guitare" & "Ampl." are identical to the font used on the Baby Fuzz.
So I think it is safe to say, they were made by the same manufacturer.
When comparing the two, while I am not anything close to a pedal builder (at all), it does seem very likely that both pedals use the same fuzz circuit. In addition to all of the components being the same (minus the transistors, which could be explained by simply one pedal coming before the other), it also used the right amount of those components.
We may never find out, but I'm hoping that someone reading this will immediately recognize it and comment on how stupid I am for not knowing basic French vocabulary. :)
So if nothing else, we finally have confirmation that the Baby Fuzz (and now the Distor Wha) was actually of French origin! So that's an exiting end to an almost 15yr mystery.
I'd still love to find out who was making these, mostly because they teeter right on the edge of a one-off garage project, and a small "boutique" level of production. But I could be way off, and maybe they were being put out by some larger French amplifier brand at the time? (finding an original advertisement would be amazing! Were there any French Rock magazines in the 60s/70s I should be digging through?)
One of my favorite things about getting into the pedal history weeds is realizing that way more countries were building pedals during that golden era than we ever gave credit to. Just over the last 6 months I have seen pedals I never knew existed from places like Turkey, Romania, Poland, Indonesia, Chile, and Korea.
Each of these have a cool story to tell, individually and as part of the larger story of Distortion (which to me is the most important discovery in all of modern music).
So as always, we seek to discover more and more. And if you happen to have any additional information about the Baby Fuzz line, please feel free to reach out via Email or Instagram
thanks for reading,
-ed
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