The Iommi connection! And thank you to my friend Mike Clement

The mustard fx project started life as Black Cat Vintage Guitar Effects (bit of a mouthful). Through these early days the whole aim was to catpture the sound of Iommi and his modified Rangemaster. 

I relentlessly researched and drove my family mad with all things Black Sabbath to try to confirm the mods I had settled on were correct. It was then by chance through one of my first customers Stephen Cutler that I became pals with Mike Clement. I had an amp needing repair and service turned out Mike lived about 20mins from my house at the time. I recall to this day the first time I met Mike in his cave surrounded by Rock history and solder fumes. 

Even if this chance meeting was a one off I was going to make the most of it so I dived in with questions about his famous boss and friends guitar tone, as it happened Mike had tried several times over the years to build a Rangemaster and pinpoint the Iommi mod, but never quite got there. We developed a nice friendship over the coming months and I even managed to get a War Pig under Tony Iommi’s fingers. 

At the time Reverb did an article on my War Pig which caused a huge surge in pre orders (that’s why we steer clear of pre orders now!!) Mike stepped in offering to build for me and together we trudged though what became a substantial pre order list in excess of 300 War Pigs excluding fuzz pedals. If you bought a Pig between 2018 and late 2021 chances are Mike built the bones of it. 

The pleasant side effect of this, I had the opportunity to spend a lot of time with Mike and hear wonderful stories from his amazing past spanning decades of Rock working with Black Sabbath and Motörhead amongst others touring all over the world. Many afternoons were spent on our lounge drinking tea (he was fussy about his tea) 

The net result of this friendship was a Unique insight into Tony Iommi’s sound at the time, more importantly I was able to answer the question: what had been done to that original Rangemaster? Turns out nobody knew I’d spent years searching for a sliver of information that didn't exist.

Going the long way around with endless trial and error my naive electronic brain had deciphered the mystery and built, to our ears, a very close representation with a combination of electronic logic and lots of listening. 

We then set off on a tangent to build a more venue friendly version without loosing the tone. Mike also believed I had to be able to scale up the production without the reliance on increasingly rare OC44 transistors. Enter the Tube version of the War Pig. Roughly the same principle but much quieter much more consistent, retaining that warm tone associated with the OC44 version by virtue of using a Mullard ecc70 miniature tube. 

This project was ultimately finished after Mikes passing sadly and it sits on my bench awaiting release in 2025. 

Fast forward nearly 3 years and out of the blue while fishing near my workshop I get a call from Mike Exeter! Tony and himself had been working through boost pedals and found my War Pig plugged it in and loved it!!!!! I could have floated back to my little workshop on a cloud to have a direct nod from my hero was just incredible. All because when I gave Mike that very first War a pig for Tony to try I wrote my phone number in sharpy on the bottom.