This is a report on my build on the Escobedo “Jawari Fuzz” circuit. I laid this out myself. I guess I’m a sucker for novelty pedals that make a guitar sound like other instruments (Chalumeau, Trumpeter, etc) and I was interested in giving this one a shot.

Inspiration

The name for this pedal, the Gray Hornbill Fuzz, was selected because the Indian Gray Hornbill is a distinctive bird from India. I was lucky enough to see one while visiting. It’s an absolutely wild bird that looks a cross between a small dinosaur and a toucan. There’s a bunch of hornbills out there and I felt like it would be cool to make a pedal based on one.

I came to this pedal with a very specific concept in mind, which is that I wanted the pedal to look like the Indian flag (orange, white and green top to bottom), with a bird in the middle. Hence the background with the sunset and fog. I’m very happy with the result, which is about as good as I could have hoped to match my vision. In the end it’s not my favorite design but I thought the idea was clever and the bird is fun. It’s also nice working on a pedal with fewer than three knobs, since it gives a lot more space to work with.

The Build

It’s a very simple circuit with just a few parts. I guess Escobedo calls it a circuit fragment. There’s onlt a few components to populate.

The circuit (fragment) itself is relatively quiet and barely has unity gain with the volume maxed out. I didn’t like how quiet it got, so I jammed a Szukalski@ Uggsy Boost into it (a Dylan159 design). I stuck a trimpot onto the Uggsy rather than a regular pot, and fiddled with the settings until I found the right volume, then wrapped the trimpot with electrical tape to prevent shorts. This was before I got heatshrink and I could definitely make it neater, but it works…

I’d like to update the board to add an onboard boost to the circuit, rather than relying on a separate board. It’s on my to-do list :).

The Pedal

The Jawari is supposed to sound vaguely like a sitar, and it does - particularly on the D and G strings, between frets 0 and 12. Above 12 it has more of an octave fuzz feel. Elsewhere on the neck, it’s a serviceable fuzz. You’ll want to play around with the tone, volume, and pickups on your guitar and the pedal. I think also it does better with humbuckers than single coils. It’s fun to play some of the sitar bits of Beatles songs (e.g. Within You, Without You).

The circuit has a pinched, nasally, somewhat brassy sound that does sound plausibly like a sitar to my ears, though without the sympathetic strings. It’s similar to the Shin-Ei/Shiny Cowbird and maybe a bit like the Trumpeter on some settings. Part of the pinching seems to really hamper sustain, so the notes have a clipped/compressed sound.

Unlike the Trumpeter, I think this circuit is mostly a novelty, while the Trumpeter is a legitimately good fuzz on its own that can *also *do brassy tones. So this one gets three stars.

Build rating: 5/5 ⭐

Pedal rating: 3/5⭐