Inventor of the fuzz-box sound dies aged 91

The inventor of the distorted guitar fuzz box sound, Glenn Snoddy, has died at his home in Tennessee, aged 96.

After a distinguished military career, Snoddy was working as a recording and live sound engineer at various recording studios and the Grand Ole Opry.

He worked with Hank Williams on his last session, and on Johnny Cash’s ‘Ring Of Fire’.

The sound of the fuzz guitar came about accidentally during a session for country singer Marty Robbins’ single ‘Don’t Worry’.

A faulty wiring in the mixing console came up with a wild, distorted sound for the bass line, which Robbins kept in.

After ‘Don’t Worry’ reached #3 on the charts in 1961, other country singers wanted that sound, but found it difficult.

So, Snoddy invented a pedal that guitarists could change from tone to fuzzy tone, and got Gibson Guitars to patent and sell as the Maestro Fuzz-Tone FZ-1.

The pedal was not that much of a success – until Keith Richards used it on the main riff on The Rolling Stones’ ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’.

When the song went to #1 in the US and the UK and popularised the sound, there was a sudden rush for the item as a must-have.

It was also used on the theme song of TV’s Green Acres.

In the mid-’60s when Snoddy worked at Columbia and ran their studio, he hired as a janitor an aspiring writer called Kris Kristofferson.

He’d chuckle “What did I know about songwriting? Not much.”

Snoddy set up Woodland Sound Studios in East Tennessee in 1968, and The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band (Will The Circle Be Unbroken), Charlie Daniels Band (‘The Devil Went Down To Georgia’), Maybelle Carter, Roy Acuff, Earl Scruggs, Doc Watson, Loretta Lynn, Jimmy Buffett, Kansas and Gillian Welch & David Rawlings cut classic tracks there.