PRODUCT REVIEW
The various sockets and jumpers leading off of the board are held in place by a
thick rubber band. Take the band off and
underneath the breadboard you’ll find a
brass plate held in by two thumbscrews,
which are common household lamp parts.
This makes it convenient to replace them in
case they wear out or get lost. Removing
the brass plate reveals yet another avenue
of tonal exploration: replacing potentiometers. Changing the values can have a
drastic effect on overall tone and response,
depending on the pot that’s changed and
the circuit it’s connected to.
I’ll admit, that’s a lot to take in. And there’s
definitely a certain mindset you have to be
in when learning how the Inventobox oper-
ates, but luckily it isn’t that difficult. The
main thing you need to understand is how
the breadboard works. It’s separated into
two sections, one for the modular circuit
boards themselves, and one for ground-
ing the components (called a ground bus).
Components are connected in columns,
meaning that any connection directly above
or below another will be part of the circuit.
Think of each column of empty connec-
tion slots as small streams of water going
down. To reroute water from one stream to
another, you’d need to connect them with a
pipe of some sort, and that’s basically what
you do with the various capacitors, resis-
tors, and jumpers that you’re encouraged to
experiment with.
So let’s talk about how all this routing stuff
would work with the Fuzz Factory module.
The Fuzz Factory derives its sometimes-
chaotic, sometimes-smooth tones from two
germanium transistors, which are inserted
into the plug-and-play board right below the
module. This allows you to try out different
types of transistors, such as silicon, which
have much harder and sharper fuzz tones.
Now, let’s say that you wanted to connect
the Fuzz Factory to the first channel (the
right footswitch). The circuit board for the
Fuzz Factory is labeled where its connections
are for Input, Output, Power In, Ground, the
Transistors, and the five controls—Volume,
Gate, Comp (compression), Drive, and Stab.
I grabbed a cable labeled E1, which the
manual states is 150mm long and has sepa-
rate lead and ground wires. After plugging
the cable into the socket marked “ 1 IN,” I
plugged the red lead wire into a breadboard
socket in the same vertical column below
the “IN” position on the Fuzz Factory’s cir-
cuit board. Then I plugged the black wire
(ground) into a socket in the ground bus.
That’s all it took to hook the input jack direct-
ly to the circuit board. Quick and painless.
One of the Inventobox’s greatest strengths
is that it lets you assign knobs to pedal
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PREMIER GUITAR JULY 2010 177
