Musicraft Tone Messer Fuzz
Photo by Ken Settle
In recent times, there’s been a concentrated effort to document every last piece of gear ephemera. Global sites like Equipboard and several other band-centric individual knowledge banks have served the gear-curious well in deciphering popular electric guitar tones over the years.
Discovering these troves of knowledge has historically boiled down to combing through blurry stage photographs and interviews with musicians via guitar magazines or physical video media. It’s not always been possible to corroborate these accounts, but the Internet is a vast and efficient machine, and there aren’t many question marks left in the grand pantheon of music equipment.
One of the last great tonal mysteries of the electric guitar was that of Mark Farner of Grand Funk Railroad, and more specifically his fuzz sound in the band’s early days. With so much documentation of who played what on which album, Farner’s tone largely eluded players that couldn’t quite put a finger on his gristly fuzz tone, especially since he appeared to use no pedals that would give him such a starkly contrasting guitar tone on demand.
Compounding the mystery was Farner’s employ of a rare guitar known as the Musicraft Messenger, a guitar built in both San Francisco and our own Astoria Oregon, with production numbers topping out at just 250. Musicraft offered an upgrade to the guitar, a built-in fuzz/distortion unit called the “Tone Messer”, and even fewer of these made it into the wild.
The Tone Messer circuit was a two-transistor fuzz that ran off a single AA battery, just like the Maestro FZ-1A, But unlike that circuit, the Tone Messer employed silicon transistors for stability and a wildly different topology, more akin to another obscure device, the Pep Box.
The sound of the Tone Messer is largely additive; it is, after all, a built-in fuzz unit. But something magical happened when Farner clicked it on. Somewhat like the Dallas Rangemaster in utility, the Tone Messer sounded fine on its own, but the magic shone through when fed into a dirty amp. Guitarists that employed treble boosters often found this a happy accident, needing to push their amps into breakup just to be heard in large venues.
GFR’s amps were built by a little-known company called West Laboratories out of Michigan, who provided Farner with an obscenely loud 200W amplifier called the Fillmore. Much like their transatlantic brethren off Hiwatt, the Fillmore was a stubborn mule of an amp that needed a little push to be truly saturated. When Farner redlined his own Fillmore, adding the Tone Messer to the front end of the West Labs amps created the harmonically rich fuzz sound for which those first four GFR albums are known.
The sound of the Tone Messer on its own is unique; it definitely sounds like what one might picture when thinking about a fuzz circuit built into a guitar. Much like Australia’s built-in Electra MPC that came out years after the Messenger, the sound is straightforward and blends seamlessly with the rest of the gear, providing a distinct and unique front-end boost for an amp or auxiliary equipment.
And because it was built right into the guitar, there was no need to overthink signal chain placement. There’s something to be said about making do with clearly delineated constraints, much like the Adrian Belew approach to playing guitar (a different article in due time).
The Tone Messer has no output volume control; the maximum volume is directly correlated to supply voltage. Since the Tone Messer ran on a single AA battery—1.5 volts—the output volume gets just above unity gain. Into a clean amp, this pays dividends by significantly altering the sound without much of an output boost. But into a maxed-out amp, it provides a much more dramatic effect.
Our new Majestic Railway offers a significant quality of life upgrade by supplementing the Tone Messer circuit with a much needed output volume boost to use it how you like, be it later on in the chain or at whichever volume you prefer. It also includes pickup simulation circuitry that’s tuned to the gold foil pickups found in the original Messenger guitar, along with that guitar’s volume and tone controls to really dial in the right sound for your rig.
It’s a cool piece of gear history used by an unsung tonal hero, and now’s your chance to snag one. If you’re looking for a unique and historically relevant fuzz tone that you haven’t already heard hundreds of times, this is the box for you.