An Effect Pedal by Jeff Starr

The Ruthie effect pedal uses dynamic companded asymmetric clipping to create a tactile response as you play guitar.

Adjust your instrument volume and change your pick attack to conjure robust cleans, harmonically rich overdrive and fully gated fuzz.

Use the single EQ knob, the Mitten’s Control, to tighten the fuzz depth and help your guitar cut in an audio mix.

Each Ruthie is uniquely painted, signed and dated by me.

A Long History

I designed The Ruthie to bring out the uniqueness of each guitar that plugs into it. 

One of the consistent issues I ran into with overdrive, distortion and fuzz pedals is that they always cause a major shift in the tone of my guitar and they often make different guitars sound the same.  

Additionally, many gain pedals lack touch sensitive dynamics and this causes the tactile loop between the guitar and the amp to die. I wanted to enhance the tactile response of playing my guitar so that it always felt like I was using a hot & loud amp.

If you have ever played circuits based on a Fuzz Face or the Tone Bender or then you have likely learned a few basic rules: volume at max, set your fuzz level to taste and then roll down your guitar volume for some of the best clean sounds you have ever heard.

You also likely learned the drawbacks vintage circuits face: High levels of hissy noise, radio interference bleeding into your signal, transistors tempermental to temperature, component tolerances eroding consistency, and a serious dislike of buffers.

While The Ruthie can trace its sonic lineage back to classic pedals like the Fuzz Face and Tone Benders I put a focus on touch sensitivity, with better clean up and low frequency sculpting. I only use high quality components to achieve my obsession with creating a consistent low noise circuit. Plus you can use Ruthie with a buffer. I am extremely proud of the pedal and I think you are going to love it.

At the core of its design, Ruthie utilizes carefully selected PNP transistors. I spent over a year – partnered with an electrical engineer – to make sure we focused on the specific values in transistors that actually matter to the tone. I did a lot of A/B testing using through-hole and surface mount transistors. I spent days recording and comparing the frequency profiles that the transistors generated. And, I spent way too many hours recording and then obsessing over the frequencies of the noise generated at loud volumes. I really wanted to get this right and the transistors I’ve chosen provide a very dynamic gain range with a touch responsiveness that allows for beautiful cleans and gated thick fuzz. 

Beyond the transistors, the additional components were carefully selected with a focus on low tolerances, in some cases as low as 1%. Most mass produced pedals use components with 20% tolerances. Once you put everything into the audio circuit those tolerances add up and one assembled pedal can sound different from the next. The tolerance in the bias voltage between Ruthie units is no more than 0.1% – if they are even different at all. It doesn’t matter what Ruthie you play, they will all sound exactly the same. I build and solder everything myself. I want to ensure that each pedal sounds perfect. 

The Ruthie takes a surprising approach to guitar pedals by being bold enough to remove the stomp switch. But, this was only done after countless months of testing and realizing that the circuit cleans up so beautifully and without a dramatic loss in volume that I simply never turned it off. Removing the foot switch also gives me a larger canvas to do the custom paint job.

Should you want to turn the pedal off, a true bypass switch is available next to the input jack and it takes your guitar signal completely out of The Ruthie.  If you are like me, you will find that your guitar suddenly feels lifeless and you will rush to activate the pedal again.

Finally, The Ruthie’s tactile response also makes the pedal a great addition to modeling, digital and solid state amps that lack “the feel” of playing a hot tube amp.  You can feel the pedal compressing and sagging as you change the attack of your notes.

Quick Start Guide

1. With The Ruthie in bypass, set your amp to the volume and tone you like best. 
2. Turn the Mitten’s knob so that the white line is fully to the left. This will give you maximum fuzz and the most bass frequency passthrough.
3. Lower your guitar’s volume to around 50% and activate The Ruthie pedal. Your guitar should sound familiar to your normal bypassed tone but now it’s sweeter, more dynamic, lightly boosted.  Play and slowly increase your guitar volume. With the volume around 65% you should be at unity volume when compared to bypass at 100%. Continue to increase the instrument volume to the maximum. The Ruthie will continue to overdrive more, eat up your signal and roar with a thick fuzzy tone.
4. Play your guitar softly to hear the pedal clean up, hit your strings hard to create fuzz. Try playing with your volume at 90% and 70%. Learn how it reacts to your playing and volume dynamics.
5. Now that you understand how volume influences The Ruthie, begin to turn the Mitten’s control to the right and cut low end frequencies. This will tighten up the fuzz response as well.

Guidelines for Best Performance

1. I recommend putting Ruthie first pedal in your signal chain. It uses a medium impedance input and connecting it directly to your guitar will give you a better tactile feel. That said, you can run a pedal with a buffer into The Ruthie. Because Ruthie is so transparent, buffers going into The Ruthie will often make your sound brighter.
2. Running other overdrives after The Ruthie works great!  Because you can have a “clean” signal by turning down your guitar’s volume, other stop boxes function as expected. You can then roll up your guitar’s volume to create stacked gain effects that are really wild.
3. Powering The Ruthie from a high quality power supply with isolated DC ports will almost always sound cleaner and better than using a 9v battery. See the section on power for more info.
4. The Mitten’s control is subtle but powerful.
   • The Mitten’s knob is more than a tone control as it also controls how your guitar’s signal interacts with the pedal. Maximum bass from the Mitten knob means more of your guitar’s frequencies, specifically low frequencies, will run into the transistors. As a result, the fuzz will increase.  Maximum bass for maximum fuzz!
   • If Ruthie is getting too thick and wooly, adjust your Mittens to cool things off. Reducing low-end brings back sparkle and clarity.  
   • Hot and dark pickups, like the rail-hammers in my Reverend AirSonic, will also cause The Ruthie to become angrier and gate a lot more than low output single coil pickups.  Ruthie is designed to respond to the character and frequency range of your pickups. The Mittens control is very useful when changing guitars.
   • With your instrument volume around 65% Ruthie should have a clean sound. Use the mitten’s control to adjust the EQ to replicate when the pedal is in bypass. I designed The Ruthie so that I would be able to preserve the clean sound of my single coil, humbucker and baritone guitars even when the pedal is active. 

Painting

The exterior of each pedal is hand painted by me in my Decon:Degen style and I will never make the same painting twice. 

Why hand paint the pedal? I know The Ruthie is special but there is a lot of competition in the Fuzz Pedal marketplace.  I wanted to give you something else beyond a great pedal. I also know that pedal collecting can get pretty wild on the used market so each painting provides rarity and plays into that collectable game.

You will be able to see the texture of the paint and other happy accidents that showcase it’s organic creation. These are not flaws. It’s hours of my life – often days to make a single painting – that has been put into the physical object you now hold. There is some unplanned chaos along the way before these leave my shop and go into your hands. These are honest handmade pieces of art – and they also happen to be kick-ass guitar pedals. Each Ruthie is signed, dated and given a clear coat to help preserve the artwork.

The pedal belongs to you. You can let it earn battle scars on the road or you can baby it and keep it pristine. It’s up to you. Whatever gives you happiness.

I hope to see these pedals being used. Show them off and tag me in your social media posts. I am @jeffstarr on YouTube and @mrjeffreystarr on instagram. 

Powering The Ruthie

The Ruthie can be powered via a 9v battery using the internal battery snap or by using the included 2.5mm center positive DC input jack. If you are using DC power then you need to use a 2.5mm plug with CENTER POSITIVE power running at 9 volts (or less).  The Ruthie will NOT run about 9volts.

The way this pedal is powered is unique and classic in its design.  Ruthie uses PNP transistors and this means that the positive voltage is going to ground. While this was common in fuzz pedals from the late 60s it’s uncommon in the modern era where 90% of all modern guitar pedals use negative voltage to the ground. PNP power allowed me to choose the specific transistors used in The Ruthie. 

It also required some unique considerations in the design.

You can NOT use a common 2.1mm 9-volt center negative power supply that you might use for a Boss pedal. I made the DC power input on The Ruthie a larger size to avoid the wrong power cable being used.  

For The Ruthie you will need a 2.5mm 9v CENTER POSITIVE cable.  This size plug with center positive power is available for most power supplies by brands like Voodoo Labs, Strymon, Fender, and TrueTone. Many times this adapter is even included in the power supply kit and given a different color.  Check the instructions for your power supply.

 I also worked with my electrical engineer to build in extremely robust power filtering. I wanted to ensure that using The Ruthie with an inexpensive power supply would still sound clean.  

Finally, you can always power The Ruthie by unscrewing the 4 screws on the bottom and installing a standard 9-volt battery.  

My recommendation is to power Ruthie off an isolated DC port on a dedicated power supply. The pedal will almost always sound better this way.

WARNINGS and WARRANTY

If you look inside the pedal you will see two mini trim pots.  Do NOT adjust these. Seriously, do NOT touch them. You could potentially short circuit the pedal and ruin it. I will have set these trim pots to specific voltages, measured and played each pedal before it ships. 

Once again, do not adjust the trim pots. If you have done this, send it back to me and I’ll re-set them for free.  You just need to pay for the shipping.

Should the internals of your pedal break, contact me, send it back I’ll fix it free of charge. But, be aware that because of the limited nature of builds, repairs may take a while.  So once again, don’t mess with the internal trim pots!

Please note that I will NOT repaint a pedal. Damage to the enclosure and artwork is expected and is not covered. See section on painting for more information.

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The Ruthie is designed and built by Jeff Starr and is a division of 5 Starr Music Products LLC