Just like its fellow countrypedals, the history of the Kay FUZ-1 Fuzz Tone seems to have been lost to both time and translation. For decades all we've ever known is that it was built in Japan, it was based off of either the Univox Super Fuzz or the Mac-Tone Fuzz Machine (aka, Ibanez Standard Fuzz), and that it was famously used by both the Edge and Daniel Lanois.
The remaining "factoids" that currently exist have typically been a combination of best guesses and somewhat poorly calculated deductive reasoning. I myself unfortunately helped to perpetuate some untruths about the Kay Fuzz in past, simply because it was easier to believe what I had always heard rather than take the time to look into it myself.
So today we're going to go deep into the history of the Kay Fuzz Tone, and see if we can hopefully right some of those wrongs...
The remaining "factoids" that currently exist have typically been a combination of best guesses and somewhat poorly calculated deductive reasoning. I myself unfortunately helped to perpetuate some untruths about the Kay Fuzz in past, simply because it was easier to believe what I had always heard rather than take the time to look into it myself.
So today we're going to go deep into the history of the Kay Fuzz Tone, and see if we can hopefully right some of those wrongs...
Like most of you, my impression has always been that the Kay Fuzz was released "some time in the late 60s". And because I had never heard differently, I just accepted this as the hard truth. But as you might be guessing, we were all wrong!
And when I thought about it, 1969 (and especially 1968) does feel kind of early when you learn what the pedal actually is. But we'll talk about that more in a minute.
So a few years ago I knew that I had to track down some type of advertisement or printed evidence showing exactly WHEN the Kay existed. And while combing though pages and pages of old issues of Music Trades magazine, I found exactly what I was looking for! A product announcement for the original three Kay "Sound Benders" effects series; the red WaWa-1 Wah Wah, the blue Trem-1 Tremolo, and the orange FUZ-1 Fuzz Tone. But immediately after my excitement died down I became legitimately shocked when I realized the date on the cover of the magazine was January of 1974!!!
This was wayyyyy later than any of us had ever considered. So I had my questions, because for a product to appear in Music Trades it means that a major distributer has picked it up and it's ready to sell nationwide. Sometimes this can happen months after the pedal is actually released, so I knew I needed to find some additional confirmation. Then a few months later I happened to stumble on to the image below (on the left), showing a completely different announcement for the Kay pedals in an issue of UK's Beat Instrumental magazine, dated to October of 1973!
In the same issue B.I. also published a report on the AMII (Associated Musical Instruments Industries) Trade Fair that took place the previous month. And included in the piece was a nice little write up about the new Kay line of guitars and effects! This article (and the accompanying ad) also mentioned "W.M.I." as the owners of the brand. (*and while George Osztreicher is presented here as being part of the company, he was more of a business partner at the time, acting as their importer to the UK. Later on he would play a larger role in W.M.I. and eventually take over the Kay name after W.M.I. went out of business)
If we take a peak inside the Kays a few more clues start to reveal themselves. Notice the first image below; it shows the back of a potentiometer inside the Kay Fuzz Tone with a date code "533E", which translates to the 33rd week of 1975. Unfortunately there are very few images of the pots online, so this is the earliest code I've been able to find so far. But I have seen a later code, dating to August of 1977! This shows that the Kay Fuzz was made for quite a while, which is also reflected in the sheer amount that still exist today.
Another interesting point to consider is the circuit itself. It's clearly a Univox Super Fuzz derivative. But we now know that famous circuit first appeared as the Honey Baby Crying Fuzz in 1967. Just a year later a former Honey employee would join Ace Tone and design his own modified version of the fuzz, calling it the FM-2 Fuzz Master. A year after this another brand would jump on the bandwagon with a similar mod; Guyatone would release their own 5 transistor version, the FS-2 Buzz Box. And finally, in the Summer of 1970, Mac-Tone would come out with their Fuzz Machine, which was possibly designed as a modification to the the Guyatone? So when Kay (or whoever manufactured these) was ready to release their own fuzz box, most likely in a attempt to cut costs even further, they reduced the circuit down to just 4 transistors from the 6 found in the original Honey Baby Crying fuzz.
This all feels like a logical progression, with one pedal inspiring the next. And in a attempt to compete, Kay seemed to choose a race to the bottom of price as opposed to taking on all the other Super Fuzz knock-offs in either tone or build quality. As a result the Kay fuzz is much grittier and more "primitive" sounding in comparison, giving an almost gated and more raw tone that sits somewhere between a typical octave fuzz and a Fuzzrite. And by 1973 this upper-octave style had spread all over the world, especially in the US where the Fender Blender, the Ampeg Scrambler, and the fOXX Tone Machine had been on the market for a few years at that point. So it does make sense that this was the path Kay chose as well.
I think if we take all of this into account, we can finally lay to rest the idea that the Kay Fuzz was released any earlier than 1973.
But who actually built the Kay Fuzz Tone?
Located on the bottom rubber pad of each Kay effect is stamp that reads, "Made in Japan". And one quick look inside reveals nearly every component is also of Japanese origin. But to this day we still don't know who built them.
There is a possible clue to this, which in the US at least is not widely known; the Kay fuzz was also sold in Japan as the Uecks Fuzz Tone. Uecks was the brand name for the Ueki Gakki (Musical Instruments) Company. In addition to the rebranded Kay effects, they also had their own branding of the Univox Micro Fazer, called the Mini Fazer. Ueki Gakki Co., it has been rumored, was started by Takenori Ueki who was one of the founders and original president of the brand Honey. One thing we do know for sure, based on the below image from Player magazine's musical instrument buyer's guide, is that the Uecks pedals were available to purchase in June of 1976. Unfortunately beyond this, my research has fallen a bit short, as that's really all we know about the mysterious brand.
So was the Fuzz Tone a "Uecks" pedal? Was it a situation where a single manufacturer sold the effect to each brand, and neither had any real tie to the builder? Or, was it something else completely?
Another clue that's hiding right on the circuit board itself, is what looks like the letters, "IDEAN F-1". Obviously "F-1" is the name of the circuit, but what the hell is "IDEAN"??? I have tried searching this a million different ways, but each time I come up with nothing.
Is that inscription somehow related to where these were built? Each effect in the series has the letters "IDEAN" etched into their boards, but is it simply a mark of the company who printed the PCB's? Or, is it just some inside jargon that's basically meaningless to the outside world?
I would LOVE to find out!
So wherever these were built they must have had the capability to make the pedals and also ship them out, ready to sell. And that is the mark of company that not only had their own factory, but also sold their own branded products. Which could very well mean that Ueki Gakki was the original manufacturer!
Except we have to remember that right around this same time they were selling the Ueck's Mini Fazer, which was clearly an OEM product built for them. And unfortunately, that fact brings us right back to the beginning of this search.
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Not often talked about in the world of pedal history is HOW LONG a pedal was in production/being sold. As we saw in the article about the Ace Tone FM-2, it had a surprising decade-long run; found in catalogs from 1968 all the way to 1979!
And now that we know the Kay pedals began showing up in print around the Fall of 1973, the next question is, when did they finally disappear?
Well I was able to track down a few newspaper ads (see below) that mentioned the Kay pedals. The top image, from April 1977, shows what a appears to be a music/pawn shop advertising the "New Kay" Fuzz and Wah. While the image below it, from a different shop, just a year later shows the same two pedals now discounted.
I believe, from everything I have seen (so far) that the run dates for the original 3 Kay pedals are, late 1973 - early 1978. Which helps a bit to explain the amount of these that are still out there, popping up for sale pretty consistently over the last couple decades. While they are not abundant by any means, you could almost certainly buy a Kay Fuzz or Kay Wah right now if you wanted to.
While looking into the Kay Fuzz I also took a quick detour to see what I could find on the other effects, because maybe we could garner even just one more helpful clue.
And after staring at the Kay Wah for a while, it finally hit me that it was very similar to the Univox Uniwah! In addition to the obvious (they both use plastic treadle enclosures) both effects also run off of C batteries (the Kay uses one, while the Uniwah uses three).
Additionally, and it's something you'll want to look into for yourself because I don't understand the technical aspect, but apparently the ways both pedals produce the wah effects is very similar only to each other, and not like the typical Vox or Crybaby styles that most other brands rip off.
This may indicate that the designer took inspiration from the Univox Super Fuzz for the Kay Fuzz and the Univox Uniwah for the Kay Wah, but was then asked to make a cheaper version of each? That being said, I don't believe there was any connection between the two brands beyond this.
I thought I was finished with this article, but decided to explore down one final avenue I hadn't yet, just to be sure...
Like we said earlier, for decades the Kay Fuzz Tone has been thought of as a "relic of the late 60s"; with most people guessing it's inception falling somewhere between 1968 and '69. And while I feel pretty good that we confidently disproved this already, I still wanted to find more hard evidence. So I looked into the history of the company itself.
It turns out that in 1968 Kay, and its parent company Valco, were going bankrupt. Sales were falling off as competition with import brands became too costly to fight. And within a year the rights to Kay were being auctioned off to the highest bidder. It would take almost an entire year before a buyer would be solidified, and this is where W.M.I. would take over. Weiss Musical Instruments corporation, located in Indianapolis, had been around since the mid 60s, mainly as an importer of both Japanese guitars (Teisco, for example) and various instruments from around Europe. By 1969 they had grown large enough to acquire the Kay brand and begin an effort to revive its name.
Over the next three years W.M.I. would slowly reintroduce Kay by way of rebranding imported Teisco guitars from Japan. And in 1973, with a full lineup of "new" products, Kay was finally back!
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That initial 1973 relaunch would include a lineup of guitars (electric and acoustic), a variety of banjos, and a set of four amplifiers. There were no effects present, but we now know that's because they wouldn't be available until the Fall of that year.
I have tried to dig in even more to see if maybe there was some connection between the effects, the amps, and the guitars, but nothing has come up. Which is pretty typical for the time. Even large US brands like Guild would sell a mixture of imported instruments from all over the place. At one point Guild was simultaneously selling pedals made by Electro Harmonix, fOXX, Top Gear, and Applied Audio, and all rebranded with their own logo.
If Uecks was in fact owned by Takenori Ueki, then that would mean he was working for Teisco in 1965/'66 and was possibly aware, or even previously acquainted with W.M.I.. As we've discussed before, Honey was born in 1967 after Kawai had acquired Teisco some months prior (*this also resulted in birthing Firstman, Idol, and Yukichi Iwase's "Voice, Singing Electric" brand). Ueki was previously head of the Sales department at Teisco and as a result could easily have dealt with W.M.I. at some point in the previous two years. And while this is just my best guess, it's not without at least a little justification. :)
But even if this were the case, it wouldn't necessarily mean that Uecks was the original manufacturer of the pedals (as tempting as that conclusion is to make). And if we look back at everything we've covered in this article, it would be very difficult to say that they were anything more than a simple go-between for Kay and whoever did build the effects. As of now we have only ever seen these pedals under those two brandings.
Which leads me to believe the best possible guess here is that POTENTIALLY W.M.I., attempting to rebuild the Kay brand, reached out to Takenori Ueki for help. He then hired a local builder to make a set of cheap stompboxes. And after the deal was struck it led to both the Kay pedal line (export) and the Uecks effects (domestic).
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By the end of the 70s W.M.I. had moved most of their import business from Japan to Korea. Moreover, they even started manufacturing very low-cost guitars in their Chicago warehouse around 1980. So 1978, as I had guessed earlier, makes even more sense now as the final year of the Kay pedal line, which corresponds perfectly with the disappearance of the local newspaper advertisements.
The brand profile above, taken from a 1977 Music Trades magazine, mentions a "trimmed down" Kay offering that would only include "fast-moving" items. Which is something that screams of a company in decline, desperately trying to save money where they can. And yes, we have again arrived at the part of the post where we're just guessing, but I do believe we've done an otherwise pretty good job piecing together what most likely occurred with the Kay pedal line from its inception to its final days.
As always we will keep searching for any missing information on our end, and obviously we welcome any additional bits that you might have! So if you happen to have more info on either Kay or Uecks please feel free to reach out via Email, Substack, or Instagram.
-ed
