FOUR ON THE FLOOR-RYAN RATAJSKI OF FUZZROCIOUS PEDALS

The Guitar Knobsblog

What are your four ‘must-have’ pedals? That is what we ask our guests to share with you in our Four On the Floor podcast segment. Ryan is a big personality who likes big sounds and has big ideas. Pretty ideal for a pedal builder! If you are not familiar with Fuzzrocious Pedals do yourself a favor and check them out. He gave us a fantastic interview too! You can hear the episode for yourself right here. Check out these choices for his Four On The Floor.

1. Moog – MF-107 Moogerfooger Freqbox

“This pedal. Um, I’ve owned it twice. I should never have sold it the first time. It’s not one of the Moog’s that gets like a whole lot of love from most players or just anyone. I think it’s awesome to be able to emulate a synth in whatever you’re doing and the fact that you can like move between different wave forms on it I think is super awesome. But I think where the pedal excels is the play between the filter and the envelope and using an expression pedal with that just opens this pedal up to do all the huge like filter envelope sweeps that I love to do. I should have never sold the first time. Uh, I think this is the paddle that I would take with me to like the scummy bar because I couldn’t play without it.

Check out the Moog – MF-107 Moogerfooger Freqbox

2. SFX – Micro Thumpinator

“I think, uh, that’s one of the pedals that’s probably been with me the longest. I believe it’s just like a one-man show thing and he just kind of builds things on custom order. Uh, we’ve found about, um, through the Talk Bass forum. This pedal essentially cuts off everything…I want to say it’s below 50 Hertz, but essentially like below the register that you actually can’t humanly here, but like it’s more power for your amp to be pushing that stuff out and then your speakers aren’t doing anything with it or you’re like flubbing your speakers. So I like having that pedal around to just make sure that whatever I’m using like octave stuff or even with like some of the waveforms on the freak box, or whatever hits the amp, then hits my speakers are the frequencies that your body is going to feel— your ears are actually going to hear our here. I want just to make sure the low end is protected.”

Check out the SFX – Micro Thumpinator

3. Fuzzrocious – Cat Tail Drive

“I absolutely love the vintage big box reissue a RAT with an LM308 (opamp). It’s what I got started with modding and doing all this pedal stuff. I fell in love with the tone of it. The Cat Tail is an evolution of my original take on the RAT. It’s one of those pedals that just feels like the way I want to sound, like in my head. It’s that one pedal that just helps me pop in the mix, right in those grindy mids. So when cymbals are crashing and the guitar players are like either operating inside of my bass frequencies or they’re like wankin’ all over the place, I can still feel like I’m pushing forward, being percussive and pushy in the mix.”

Check out the Fuzzrocious – Cat Tail Drive

4. Roland – Jet Phaser

Another pedal that I’ve owned—twice. It is the complete spaceship jet sound. It sounds like your bass is just taking off. It’ll do that slow sweep/woosh thing. And then you can click it over to like the double speed and chop up that sound. So it’s, uh, it’s unique. It weighs like 35 pounds haha. It’s definitely one pedal that’s inspiring to me in terms of the kind of pedals I want to be able to.

Check out the Roland – Jet Phaser


Huge thanks to Ryan for being a guest on our show and please check out Fuzzrocious Pedals. We wish him continued success!