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Now everyone can enjoy Fender’s Kevin Shields signature pedal with the new non-limited Shields Blender
Now available (forever) at just £279/ $299.
Image: Fender
Fans of My Bloody Valentine can now enjoy the sonic chaos of resident guitar wiz Kevin Shields as Fender has launched a non-limited version of the Shields Blender pedal.
A couple months ago, the guitar community collectively lost their minds when Fender released the limited edition Shields Blender fuzz pedal, which — to no one’s surprise — sold-out worldwide pretty much immediately as just 700 of the hand-signed units were made.
Fans have been clamouring for more and it appears that Fender has heard those calls, as a standard model of the Shields Blender is now in full production.
Just like the limited edition version, the new Blender echoes the tone of Shields’ own vintage 1970s Fender Blender, thanks to carefully hand tracing the circuit from his personal fuzz box, but with a very different overall outcome.
It also features the same two-channel setup — channel one blends the fuzz voice with the original clean signal while channel two removes the clean signal and blends the fuzz with a monophonic sub octave fuzz, and a sag circuit that uses dynamic sensing circuitry to create “imploding fuzz tones”.
And while Fender has done away with the Shields-signed backplate on the standard edition, they’ve also brought the pedal’s price down to just £279/ $299 instead of the original $499.
“It was a long process, but it was fun, kinda,” Shields said of the Blender’s making in a recent interview with Guitar. “First of all there was the phenomenon of ‘Here’s a max amount of things you can fit into this pedal…’ So I was like, ‘Okay, so what can I do? What can we put in?’ Then it was just about honing in on the sag effect. Everything else was quite easy, really, but the sag thing took a while to get there.”
Check out the Fender Shields Blender pedal in action below.
Learn more at Fender.