The Unpleasant Surprise

The Fairfield Circuitry The Unpleasant Surprise is an experimental fuzz and gate pedal designed to produce unconventional, harsh, and dynamic distortion while preserving the character of the original performance. Its controls shape everything from output level and saturation to gating behavior, distortion texture, treble response, and signal compression. The Onset control adjusts gain and gate-like response, ranging from long sustain to sputtering, gated effects, while the Gain and Crush controls alter amplifier bias and compression for a wide variety of distortion textures. A simple treble cut completes the tonal controls, and the pedal provides enough output level to drive an amplifier or subsequent pedals.