Caroline Guitar Company Shigeharu Germanium Octave Fuzz

These limited Germanium editions for SHIGEHARU are pretty sweet.

Now, while it would have been easy enough for CGC to say “voila! We have substituted these germanium parts for the perfectly functioning silicon ones for more ‘authentic’ tones. Now give us money as we ride this buzzword & trend” that just would not have been good enough for CGC, for the retailers, or the customers.

So in addition to the parallel octave circuit of the Shigeharu getting a bit more of a *woody* texture and sound from some new old stock Soviet parts they used, they also tweaked each of the transistor gain stages to more closely resemble one of their favorite old bubble-font Soviet era fuzzstortions in our reference lab.

The end result is still PLENTY of gain – I mean, good lord, you should know us by now, right? – but more wooly, a bit more low end, and a bit more bark and a little less bite than the standard Shigeharu. There’s still an incredible range of overdriven, distorted, and all out fuzzy sounds here and – while we still can! – these are hand-wired at the workshop in Columbia, S.C.

The first run of Army Green in early 2024 sold out in a hurry, so they're delivering a limited batch of these again, this time with the red star for the gain control.