Fender partners with My Bloody Valentine’s Kevin Shields for his first-ever piece of signature gear
The Fender Shields Blender Pedal is modelled on the original Fender Blender, an octave fuzz unit introduced in 1968.
Credit: Fender
Fender have partnered with My Bloody Valentine frontman Kevin Shields for the Fender Shields Blender Pedal, his first piece of signature gear ever.
Designed around the circuit of the original Fender Blender – an octave fuzz unit that was introduced back in 1968 – the Fender Shields bears the bulk of its predecessor’s features, but adds a Kevin Shields-chosen tweaks, including an octave-up push button to toggle the original octave-up fuzz voice on and off. This, Fender says, unlocks “all-new vintage fuzz tones”.
Elsewhere, the pedal boasts two footswitchable channels, which can be toggled between via the Octave footswitch. Channel One blends the fuzz voice with the original clean signal, while Channel Two removes the clean signal entirely and instead blends the fuzz with a monophonic sub octave fuzz.
Other controls include Volume and Blend knobs – which can be used to set the desired balance of clean and fuzz signals – and Fuzz and Octave, which craft the right mix of dual or triple octave fuzz.
There’s also a reactive Sag circuit, which utilises dynamic sensing circuitry to create “imploding fuzz tones”. Fender explains: “By starving the transistors of power relative to the picking intensity used by the player, you can harness controlled chaos like no other fuzz.”
Each pedal is signed by Kevin Shields himself, and comes with a limited print art box, limited print hand-signed collector’s booklet telling the story of how the Fender x Kevin Shields collaboration came to be, and a plaque bearing Shield’s signature.
“Throughout the late ‘80s and ‘90s, Shields awakened iconic sonic walls of fuzz like the world had never heard as he defined the tone of alternative rock, inspiring the ‘shoegaze’ genre and beyond, most notably with his band’s seminal record Loveless, an album that catapulted My Bloody Valentine into a commercial success,” Fender says
“The pedal represents the revival of a classic Fender fuzz circuit from the 1970s and serves as the new penchant for the effects pedal category, which has been reimagined through a collaborative four-year development process with Kevin Shields.”
Limited to only 700 units worldwide, the Fender Shields Blender Pedal is priced at £449, and is available at Fender.com, Reverb in the US and Andertons in the UK.