Deep Trip Custom Shop Sucuri Fuzz Pedal

Sucuri is another Brazilian native name for the anaconda, a huge semiaquatic constrictor snake found in a few South American habitats, including the Amazon forest, Pantanal and Brazilian cerrado. It can travel on water and on trees as fast as on land, and its able to swallow big animals like alligators, goats and even jaguars! This pedal is an all-original fuzz circuit designed to deliver unique distortion textures, full of personality, and a particular attack bite that cannot be achieved by modern silicon semiconductors due to transistor biasing limitations. It can be used on a clean amp, or it can be paired with other distortion devices, adding gain, sustain and amazing new tones.

The unique fuzzy bite in the attack is provided by a purposely misbiased Darlington pair at the input, which provides clipping but also amplifies the tiny guitar signal to hit the final stage and generate tons of gain and sustain. That second stage is exactly where youll find the Textura control, which messes with both bias and gain to achieve a huge variety of different fuzz tones and textures, begining at low gain gated squeezed notes, sliding through a full bodied and balanced sustained sound, and end in a very compressed octave-like tone, with surprisingly strange harmonics and a very peculiar note decay. The Volume control is generous enough to allow a huge boost to hit hard anything that dares to be in front of the Sucuri, tubes or solid state.One thing thats really amazing about this pedal is how even with the strange harmonics it never sounds dissonant, ever! Those added harmonics add a certain grit that sometimes even sound like an old gramophone (We may be a little crazy, but thats exactly what we hear).

The Sucuri sound is delivered by a couple of NOS MP26A germanium transistors (made in former USSR between 1979 and 1986, that was bought in factory sealed boxes) and a single NOS ASY27 transistor made by Siemens in West Germany in the 1970s (mostly bought in factory sealed boxes as well). These pedals also contain Mallory 150 capacitors, Switchcraft connectors and G0rva Mechano footswitches (more reliable, but with softer click); and are offered with the choice of vintage-syle carbon comp resistors or modern, more reliable metal film resistors. Even the wires are special, theyre importing pre-bonded spools, more rigid, for a cleaner assembly. Fancy stuff!The idea for this project was born in the peak of the pandemic, when they werent able to offer their traditional line of pedals. Thats why it is soldered exclusively by Du Menegozzo (Deep Trip founder and developer of all circuits): He solders all the boards, and assembles the wiring with much care and planning, no margin for errors. Its Deep Trip custom shop.

This pedal only works with a 9V battery, no power supply input. They can’t include a battery in the exported pedals due to international regulations, but we recommend non-alkaline, zinc-carbon batteries. They cost pennies and will last for months, because this circuit draws tiny currents! Don’t forget to remove the plug from the input jack whenever you’re not using the pedal, so you save the battery’s charge.

Besides that, the Sucuri circuit has low input impedance, which is essential to this magical tone. That means it works best when connected directly to a passive instrument, with no other circuit between them. So we recommend you to put it first in your pedal chain for the intended tone. However, nothing impedes (pun intended) you from trying and even preferring its tone after other pedals or buffers, feel free to experiment!

Like any germanium-equipped pedal, Sucuri’s behavior and tone are temperature dependent. So, its tone may change in different environments, but we have tested and modified this circuit for pretty extreme temperature changes, so we can assure it will behave properly in any of those real life situations (although it may sound slightly different).

For more consistency, keep your pedal away from heat sources, like warm tubes or heaters, for example. Also avoid storing pedals with carbon com resistors under high humidity, those components may absorb humidity and drift in value (although they use the newer, tougher ones).