{"id":438827,"date":"2026-05-21T19:49:11","date_gmt":"2026-05-21T19:49:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/438827\/"},"modified":"2026-05-21T19:49:11","modified_gmt":"2026-05-21T19:49:11","slug":"how-khemmis-made-one-of-the-metal-records-of-the-year-using-a-28-fuzz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/438827\/","title":{"rendered":"How Khemmis made one of the metal records of the year using a $28 fuzz"},"content":{"rendered":"

We are truly living in an age of abundance when it comes to guitar gear. We live in the golden era of guitar effects pedals<\/a>, a digital era of amp modellers<\/a> and hybrid designs, and with that we have all kinds of tones available at our fingertips. <\/p>\n

We also have never been better informed about gear, about which pedal does what, and how to find the perfect overdrive pedal<\/a>. And in this online information eco-system, it is only natural that some items of gear attain a certain cachet \u2013 especially when the gear in question happens to be rare. In short, there is a lot of cork-sniffing going on.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

But the lesson from Khemmis\u2019 bravura new album, a self-titled capital H, capital M heavy metal epic with an \u00fcber-metal concept (complete with a full-on story arc, demons, madness and all that cool stuff), is that you don\u2019t need to break the bank in search of a tone that inspires you.<\/p>\n

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The Denver-based doomsters\u2019 sound could be attributed to the Orange Rockerverb tube amps<\/a> that both Phil Pendergast and Ben Hutcherson play through. It could be attributed to their Dunable electric guitars<\/a>, and the Bare Knuckle humbuckers they use.<\/p>\n

But Pendergast reveals that the secret sauce in his rhythm guitar tone on the record was a pedal so cheap that you could go into a guitar store and buy a round of them for your friends. You have probably paid more for a takeaway pizza.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy secret weapon for this record was the cheapest possible guitar pedal that you can buy, the Behringer<\/a> SF300 fuzz pedal<\/a>,\u201d says Pendergast, joining MusicRadar over Zoom. And what he finds especially amusing is that he doesn\u2019t even use the SF300 as a fuzz.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the Boost mode, it is the entirety of the guitar tone for my main rhythm tones on the record,\u201d he explains.<\/p>\n

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KHEMMIS – Beneath the Scythe (OFFICIAL MUSIC VIDEO) – YouTube
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The Behringer SF300 Super Fuzz is one of those cult classic pedals, loved for its super-cheap retail price \u2013 Pendergast’s was $28 and you can literally pick one up for just over 20 quid \u2013 and mocked for its plastic enclosure.<\/p>\n

I mean, I bought that pedal just so I could play Electric Wizard-esque riffs, just to try it out, \u2018cos it was $28 <\/p>\n

Phil Pendergast<\/p>\n

But it’s pedal whose tones speak for themselves, offering players two fuzz modes and a boost, and a fuzz circuit that performs very much like a Boss<\/a> FZ-2 Hyper Fuzz.<\/p>\n

Pendergast only bought it because he wanted to sound like Jus Oborn and Liz Buckingham, then realised that, actually, this was doing a job for him.<\/p>\n

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\u201cI mean, I bought that pedal just so I could play Electric Wizard-esque riffs, just to try it out, \u2018cos it was $28 or something,\u201d he says. \u201cThen I just went to the Boost mode and I was like, \u2018That sounds pretty damn good.\u2019 It\u2019s just a really good pedal for preserving the sound of the pickups<\/a> that you\u2019re using, and then letting you sweeten it a little, and you have quite a bit of control over how, because there is an EQ. There\u2019s a low and higher mid-range tone knob on it. It just worked. I mean, it just was the right fit.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pendergast had been using an Xotic Effects EP Booster. That\u2019s what we hear on 2021\u2019s Deceiver. And there are no complaints to be had about that. It\u2019s a single-knob boost pedal inspired by the preamp in an EP-3 tape echo machine, and as such it has become an industry standard tone-sweetener. Pendergast had plenty of options in the studio, too, and yet none could beat the Behringer.<\/p>\n

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\u201cWe had, probably, at least close to a hundred different drive pedals that we brought to the studio [laughs], and we tried a lot of them,\u201d he says. \u201cThis was the first pedal that I tried, because I was like, \u2018I think it\u2019s gonna be this.\u2019 And then we were like, \u2018There\u2019s no way it\u2019s gonna be that. Let\u2019s try other things.\u2019 And then we were like, \u2018Yeah, it’s that.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u201cIt just worked really well for what we were going for on this record. So there\u2019s this cheap-ass plastic fucking fuzz pedal that we\u2019re playing \u2013 not in fuzz mode \u2013 that is all over the record and I just think it\u2019s hilarious. That is very funny to me.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hutcherson used The King In Yellow, a parallel blending overdrive from Lichtlaerm Audio that\u2019s inspired by a Tube Screamer, and the two tones mixed worked gangbusters, each offering a slightly different midrange response.<\/p>\n

WILL IT CHUG? – BEHRINGER SUPER FUZZ FOR 25 EUROS – YouTube
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Hutcherson says there is a lesson to be had in all this, and its one that some in the doom scene needs to learn.<\/p>\n

Find gear that opens up creative possibilities for you, rather than chasing some imagined tonal perfection<\/p>\n

Ben Hutcherson<\/p>\n

\u201cI mean, gear fetishism exists in every genre,\u201d he says. \u201cBut anything remotely doomed related \u2013 or adjacent \u2013 suffers from it in a particularly nauseating way, where people think, \u2018Oh, you have to have a first-generation [Sunn] Model T. You have to have this\u2026\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

This is not how Khemmis got their sound on any of their albums.<\/p>\n

\u201cDude, some of the best tones we got in this band \u2013 until we started working with Orange \u2013 was with a Carvin X-100B and a dirt pedal in front of it, an amp that you can still get that amp for, like, 400 or 500 bucks,\u201d explains Hutcherson. \u201cPhil and I, at one point, we each had two! We paid 200 bucks per head. They\u2019re incredible amps. They take pedals great. The graphic EQ is the secret.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut at the end of the day, it\u2019s like there is so much totally fine gear, and you hit the point of diminishing returns so quickly.\u201d<\/p>\n

KHEMMIS – In The Pines (OFFICIAL MUSIC VIDEO) – YouTube
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All that time spend gear hunting could be spend practising, or better still jamming, and writing. Hutcherson and Pendergast get it; they understand the gear obsession. C\u2019mon, Hutcherson\u2019s Zoom mise en sc\u00e8ne finds him sitting next to a Peavey 6505 (just because he likes having it around) and a holy grail Ampeg V4 head. But you don\u2019t need to go overboard.<\/p>\n

\u201cFind gear that opens up creative possibilities for you, rather than chasing some imagined tonal perfection,\u201d says Hutcherson. \u201cI guess, find joy in that hunt for the new exciting piece of gear \u2013 to a reasonable extent \u2013 but a new pedal won\u2019t make you a better player. It won\u2019t make you a better songwriter.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe ideal, for me, is to have gear that gets as many roadblocks out of the way between getting the ideas from up here [taps head] and then out my fingertips. Like, whatever that needs to be. It doesn\u2019t have to be the most sought-after whatever. It just needs to be something that you play through and you feel electrified when you play it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Khemmis\u2019 self-titled LP is available to preorder<\/a> via Nuclear Blast, dropping 12 June. You can read more from Pendergast and Hutcherson \u2013 including about that gnarly concept \u2013 coming soon to MusicRadar.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"We are truly living in an age of abundance when it comes to guitar gear. We live in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":438828,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[156,157,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-438827","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-entertainment","tag-music","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/438827","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=438827"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/438827\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/438828"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=438827"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=438827"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=438827"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}