Fuzzrocious Pedals is a family-run pedal building and hand-painting business, based out of Mount Laurel, New Jersey. Ryan and Shannon Ratajski run the company together, with their kids pitching in on the hand-painted finishes that give each pedal its own look.
The company grew out of Ryan’s early experiments building a Big Muff clone around 2008, while he was playing bass in a band and looking for a fuzz tone he couldn’t find off the shelf. That project became the starting point for a full lineup of dirt pedals built around reworked versions of classic circuits.
That family framing goes further than the company name suggests. The Ratajskis’ children help paint a line of pedals sold as the kidpainted series, distinct from the standard hand-painted finishes Shannon does herself, while Ryan splits his time between the circuit side of the business and a full-time job in education.
Recent models include the Green Stache, a fuzz built around the Russian-issue Big Muff circuit, the Cat Tail, a distortion pedal with switchable clipping options, and the Demon, a low to medium-high gain overdrive with a built-in feedback loop and kill switch. Pedals ship built to order, with hand-painted finishes taking longer than the screen-printed versions, which use a faster stenciled process instead of freehand painting.
Fuzzrocious pedals have found their way onto boards for players in Tool, Deftones, Queens of the Stone Age, Chelsea Wolfe, Russian Circles, and Neurosis, among others, a reach that’s notable for a company still run out of the family’s home.
We caught up with Fuzzrocious at the NAMM Show, one booth among plenty of bigger manufacturers, and it was easy to see how much of the pedal’s personality comes from paint rather than just the circuit inside, right down to the pieces the kids had a hand in painting.
