Buzzing Bugs Stargazy review – “Not so much quirky as downright eccentric”

£179, buzzingbugsfx.com

Cornwall’s famous stargazy pie is so called because it has pilchards’ heads poking up through the crust. Cute, eh? Luckily, in the interests of both practicality and vegan-friendliness, the little fishies populating the top panel of the Buzzing Bugs Stargazy are only painted on.

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Combining digital reverb with a highly tweakable overdrive/distortion circuit, this is a very different deal to the Cornish maker’s BB01 Fuzz Pre-Amp, a Vox-voiced dirt machine that was one of my favourite pedals of 2023. On paper, BB’s latest offering looks like My Bloody Valentine in a box; in practice, it’s a bit more complicated than that.

Buzzing Bugs Stargazy – what is it?

If you take it literally, ‘stargazy’ means the opposite of ‘shoegazy’ – but I don’t think the similarity of those two words is an accident. After all, when it comes to creating a dreamy wash of guitar noise, reverb and distortion are likely to be your primary weapons… and if you’re also getting a second footswitch to send that reverb into infinite feedback, so much the dreamier.

The big knob on the left dictates the intensity of the feedback when the switch below it is engaged, while ‘mix’ and ‘load’ control the level and density of the reverb. But where this unit differs from most of its type is in the amount of control it gives you over the character of the distortion, via three knobs: ‘body’ for the fullness of the signal at the input stage; ‘gain’ for the dirt itself, from light crunch to full-on filth; and a standard treble-cutting tone control.

Buzzing Bugs Stargazy – sounds

You can, if you want to, set the gain at minimum and use the Stargazy as a clean reverb pedal. But no, you don’t want to – mostly because that’s just not much fun, but also because the level of background noise is too intrusive. Whack up the gain, however, and things take a sharp turn in the direction of “Wahey!”

This is an unexpectedly forthright kind of distortion, almost Rat-like in the way the midrange cuts through, and the noisefloor is no higher at full gain than it is at zero. What’s more, those two tone controls let you tweak the voicing with rare flexibility and precision, in terms of both low-end thickness and top-end sizzle.

The reverb (which is gently audible even with the mix at minimum) is bright and brassy, with a distinct spring-like wobble and the length fixed at a little over a second. It doesn’t really feel ‘ambient’ at all, but on top of that biting distortion it makes for a great surfy solo boost.

For the real soundscaping stuff, I have to turn to the infinity switch. Here the position of the pointy knob is all-important: set it anywhere short of two o’clock and it really doesn’t do much; start pushing it higher and you’ll hear the reverb tail stretching out until a pulsating background drone begins to roll over itself; max it out and that drone expands into something strange, unpredictable and almost completely atonal. I think the best way to describe it is the sound of being trapped in the toilets at a sawmill. And I absolutely mean that in a good way.

Buzzing Bugs Stargazy – should I buy one?

If your priority is building an MBV-style wall of noise, there are much more versatile options than the Stargazy. But if you’re looking for a high-quality distortion pedal with built-in splashy reverb and the ability to deploy spookily industrial drone effects as a bonus, this tasty and relatively affordable pie should go down a treat.

Buzzing Bugs Stargazy – alternatives

For distortion, reverb and all the fun of twiddling a joystick in one pedal, look no further than the absolutely riotous Walrus Audio Melee (£/$299). The Normal Devices Decay Cascade (£319/CA$399) goes to assorted distort-o-verb extremes including “the sound of amp death”, but don’t overlook the Caroline Meteore (£239/$219), which has a ‘havoc’ switch for eternal feedback.