JHS Volture 9v Voltage Sag Utility

Since the fuzz effect was invented in the early sixties, guitar players have gone to great lengths to achieve the perfect fuzz tone. Legends say that Duane Allman placed his fuzz pedal in the freezer between sessions to cool down the transistors, and that Roger Mayer meticulously modified Hendrix’s Fuzz Faces beyond recognition in search of an elusive, magical fuzz experience. Fortunately, even apart from these mythological methods, there’s one trick that always works: use a dying battery. Inherently simple devices like fuzz circuits are extremely sensitive to the amount of voltage that they receive, thus any change in the voltage from your power supply will cause drastically different tones. Guitarists eventually caught on to this hack and began draining their batteries to try and find the sweet spot for their fuzz pedal. A good idea in theory, but who has time for that? Then, just a few years ago, a certain unnamed guitarist reached out to me for a practical solution for this technique– and the Volture was born. 

The Volture is a modern day device for your vintage fuzz circuitry. Simply place it in between your power supply and your pedal, and you can precisely trim the input voltage and perfectly replicate the tone of a dying battery. As the song says, “Power is made by power being taken.” 

Though we developed it specifically for vintage fuzz circuits, the Volture will work on any fully analog pedal. In fact, you might be surprised by the trippy sounds you find lurking in your favorite overdrive or distortion.

With the Volture, you can input 9, 12 or 18VDC and output an adjustable voltage from 7.5VDC down to 1.25VDC, creating gated, distorted, possibly glitchy but always sputtery fuzz sounds. Input voltage is 9VDC to 18VDC, center negative. Output voltage is 1.25VDC to 7.5VDC, center negative. The Volture uses 10mA in addition to the power when it is active. The Volture should be used with pedals less than 50mA.

NOTE: As you turn the voltage down, the LED will dim simultaneously with the voltage level.