Longtime Nashville engineer and studio owner Glenn Snoddy died last year age 96. Snoddy is widely acknowledged as the guy that changed the sound of guitar music when he invented the fuzz pedal for the electric guitar.
Whilst working on a Marty Robbins session for his single ‘Don’t Worry’ guitarist Grady Martin started sounding ‘different’… a transformer in his amp had blown, and his guitar sounded distorted. The other band members liked what it was doing to his tone though and so did the execs at Marty’s label Columbia Records.
“Don’t Worry” became a big country hit and as a result Snoddy created a guitar pedal that enabled guitarists to achieve that same distorted effect at will. The Gibson Maestro Fuzz-Tone was born and became popular in country music before expanding hugely in popularity after Keith Richards used it for that stand out guitar tone on the Rolling Stones single “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction.”
So thank you Glenn Snoddy!
