EHX Big Muff Pi Black Russian #1
ID: 750
Price: $475
Shipping: TBD
Dimensions: 10x8x5
Weight: 2 lb 3 oz
Excellent condition with a few rubs and paint flaking. The battery compartment door is also missing. The paint job on this model of the black Russians was notoriously poor and easily flakes off. This one looks great now, but if you play it much, you'll no doubt have the same paint flaking problems as everyone else.
This pedal has been modded. A long time ago I used to buy these black Russians and upgrade them. A lot of them didn't sound that great, but were easy to improve. This model was made with lots of different component types, yielding pedals of widely varying tone. It is pretty easy to mod them to make them sound like other versions of the Russian Big Muffs - Civil War, Tall Font, Bubble Font, Red Army, etc. However, this one sounded really great to me with its BC547C transistors. Those are not Russian transistors. A sticker inside the battery compartment says only "51.03", which I believe means it was built just before Christmas in 2003. By then, manufacturing of the pedal was headed back to the USA. So maybe they were dropping the Russian parts and moving back to American parts at that time. The unmarked grey clipping diodes are also unusual (at least in my experience). I think it happy circumstances that lead to this particular pedal sounding so good, better than any other black Russian I had come across. The point of the story is that I did not mod anything in the audio circuit because I didn't think it could be made to sound better.
I did replace the flimsy vinyl battery snap with a hard plastic one. And I added an external power adapter for a normal 9VDC Boss style power connection. Looks like I also added or upgraded a ground wire as part of the power jack addition.
I kept records of all my mods, but I'm not able to find some of my records for that far back. However, I know I made the power related mods above and I see no other mods I would have made. I do remember this pedal and knowing that it sounded so good that I didn't want to make audio circuit mods that I would normally have made. The other components all look original and are not brands or types I would have used for mods.
