There is exactly one control on the Mythos Golden Fleece. It is labelled “More.” Turn it and the pedal gets louder. That is all it does. It does not add gain. It does not sweep a tone stack. It does not bias a transistor. It sets output level and then gets out of the way.
Every other decision — how much fuzz, how bright, how compressed, whether this thing sounds like a lit amplifier or a Champ on the edge of collapse — is made somewhere else entirely. It is made by your right hand, your pickups, and the volume knob on your guitar.
Which is either the most liberating design philosophy in modern fuzz, or the single most annoying pedal ever put on a pedalboard. In practice it is both, depending entirely on how you play. This is the article that tells you which camp you are in before you spend the money.
The short version
The Mythos Golden Fleece Fuzz is a one-knob overdrive-into-fuzz box, hand-built by Zach Broyles and a small team outside Nashville, Tennessee. It is Mythos’s best-selling pedal and, by the builder’s own account, the pedal that turned Mythos from a hobby into a company.
One control: More, which sets output only. True bypass switching. Runs on 9V DC, centre negative, drawing under 10 mA. No battery compartment. The enclosure is genuinely tiny at 3.65″ x 1.53″ x 1.07″ — this is a mini pedal in the strictest sense, roughly the footprint of a business card.
Listed price as of September 2026 is $139 direct from Mythos, where it currently shows as sold out. Used examples turn up on Reverb and through dealer stock from around $117.
Internally it does not use the transistor pair most people associate with vintage fuzz. Mythos say the fuzz comes from “a very special silicon and germanium diode pair,” built around a hand-picked NOS germanium diode. There are, in Mythos’s words, “no other internal settings, pots, switches or anything.”
And there is one hard rule you must understand before buying: the Golden Fleece must sit before any buffer. Not “should.” Must. We will spend a whole section on this because it is the number one reason people return the pedal, and it is entirely avoidable.
The obscure box in a friend’s collection
Most boutique pedals begin with a builder deciding to improve on something famous. The Golden Fleece began with a favour.
Zach Broyles told Guitar.com’s Josh Gardner in October 2019 exactly how it happened: “I think our Golden Fleece is our best-selling pedal and it came about when a friend of mine had this obscure fuzz box he wanted a back up of. I reversed the schematic and built a clone. That has evolved into this mini fuzz pedal that I’ve continually tried to improve and make the best little one-knob fuzz on the market.”
Note the phrasing. Not “inspired by.” Not “in the spirit of.” I reversed the schematic and built a clone. That level of candour is unusual in an industry that prefers the word “homage,” and it is characteristic of Broyles, whose whole public persona — including his long-running Dipped in Tone podcast with Rhett Shull — is built on refusing to mystify gear.
What the obscure box actually was
The friend’s fuzz was an Alan Yee “Fuzzy Nuts.” Mythos name it directly on the current product page, and then immediately reassure you they are not making the name up.
Alan Yee built pedals out of Memphis in roughly the early-to-mid 2000s, in very small numbers and entirely by hand. The Fuzzy Nuts was a single-knob fuzz-distortion where the one control moved volume and gain together, reaching unity somewhere around noon and continuing to pile on fuzz past that point. Yee also made a clean boost called The Last Temptation of Boost. Then he stopped, went quiet, and never came back. Attempts to reach him have gone unanswered for years, and reliable information about him is now close to nonexistent.
The reason anybody outside Memphis has ever heard of the Fuzzy Nuts is Nels Cline. Cline’s pedalboard with Wilco has been photographed, catalogued and argued over for two decades, and for a stretch of that period it contained a small black box that gear-forum archaeologists identified as an Alan Yee Fuzzy Nuts. Yee’s Last Temptation of Boost also circulated through the wider Wilco camp. That is how a pedal built in tiny numbers by an unreachable man in Tennessee’s neighbouring state acquired a mythology large enough to be worth cloning.
An honest correction before we go further
You will find plenty of retailer copy and forum shorthand implying that Nels Cline uses the Golden Fleece. He does not, or at least there is no evidence that he ever has. Cline used the original Alan Yee pedal. The Golden Fleece is a clone of that circuit made years later by a different builder.
This distinction matters more than it might seem. It means the Golden Fleece has a genuine, traceable, interesting lineage — and it means the most famous name attached to that lineage belongs to the source, not to the copy. We will name the players who are documented on the Mythos further down, and there are five of them, all verifiable. Cline is not among them.
Specifications
The buffer problem, explained properly
Mythos publish a list of their pedals that must go before a buffer. It is short: all Golden Fleece variations, the Cestus, the Hephaestus, and the 210 Double Drive. Everything else they make, including their Argo fuzz, will happily sit anywhere in a chain.
The product page does not soften it either: “It’s best before buffers, that includes buffered tuners, buffered effect loops of switching systems, etc. Buffers will kill the response and drastically change the voice of the pedal.”
Why it happens
This is the same phenomenon that has plagued vintage-voiced fuzzes since the 1960s, and it is worth understanding rather than memorising. A classic fuzz input stage presents a low input impedance — in the region of tens of kilohms rather than the one megohm a modern overdrive offers. That low impedance loads your pickups down, and that loading is not a bug. It is a substantial part of the sound, and critically it is what makes the guitar’s volume control work as a gain control instead of just a volume control.
Put a buffer in front of it and the fuzz no longer sees your pickups. It sees the buffer’s low output impedance, which does not load down at all. The result: the fuzz stops cleaning up, the top end turns brittle and the dynamic range you actually bought the pedal for collapses.
The part people miss
Owner reports collected by Equipboard from the r/guitarpedals community make one point repeatedly, and it is the one that catches people out: a buffered-bypass pedal loads your signal even when it is switched off. That is what buffered bypass means. A Wampler Tumnus sitting dark and unused in front of the Fleece will still change the Fleece’s input impedance and still flatten its response.
The same applies to buffered tuners — which is most modern pedal tuners — and to the input buffers on switching systems and loop switchers. One owner drew the comparison explicitly against an MXR-style silicon Fuzz Face variant, noting that the MXR would work happily anywhere in the chain while the Fleece would not.
The fix
Put the Golden Fleece first. Guitar, cable, Fleece, then everything else. If you must have a tuner ahead of it, use a true-bypass tuner or one with a hard-bypass mode, and confirm it rather than assuming. If you run a wireless system, be aware that most wireless receivers present a buffered output, which places you in the same situation.
Wah pedals are worth a specific mention. Owners report the Fleece struggling behind a wah, which is unsurprising given how much a wah circuit alters what the next pedal downstream sees. If you need both, the Fleece goes first and the wah goes after it, which is unconventional but works.
What is actually inside — and the honest caveat
Mythos tell you the headline: no transistor fuzz pair, a silicon and germanium diode pair doing the clipping, and a specific NOS germanium diode selected for its voice. They also confirm the pedal is deliberately barren inside — no trimmers, no jumpers, nothing to adjust.
Beyond that, the detail comes from the DIY community rather than from Mythos, and it should be labelled as exactly that.
Because the Fuzzy Nuts circuit is so simple, it has been reverse-engineered repeatedly by hobbyist builders. Threads on r/diypedals discussing Golden Fleece-style builds reference a single-transistor gain stage rather than the two- or four-transistor arrangements of a Fuzz Face or Big Muff, with the diode pair providing the clipping character. Builders in those threads discuss a 2N2222A transistor paired with an NTE109 germanium diode as a favoured combination, swapping a 45 µF electrolytic for a 10 µF to tighten a low end they found flabby, and replacing a 33n coupling capacitor with an 18n alongside a BC108 silicon transistor for a more focused voice.
None of that comes from Mythos. It is community reconstruction, built by ear against real units and against the original Yee circuit, and the exact devices Broyles uses in a current production Fleece have never been publicly confirmed. Treat it as a useful map of the territory, not as a schematic.
What the single-transistor architecture does explain is the pedal’s behaviour. Owners consistently note that the Fleece is unusually responsive to pick dynamics and volume changes and unusually sensitive to what is in front of it — both of which are exactly what you would expect from a minimal circuit with one gain device and no input buffer standing between your pickups and the clipping stage.
Famous players — verified, and one that isn’t
Five players are documented on the Golden Fleece with photo or video evidence. That is a modest list by the standards of a Big Muff, and an unusually clean one by the standards of a boutique brand, because every entry here has a source you can go and look at.
Chris Buck (Cardinal Black)
The strongest citation of the group. Buck’s Golden Fleece is documented in his Premier Guitar Rig Rundown, “Chris Buck’s Yamaha Revstar and Double-Tiered Pedalboard,” filmed by John Bohlinger when the Welsh guitarist brought Cardinal Black to the United States for their first US shows, at Nashville’s Basement East.
Buck matters here for a specific reason beyond the name recognition. His signature Yamaha Revstar was voiced with Yamaha Japan around P-90s specifically tuned to go almost acoustic when the volume is rolled back into a driven amp. That is precisely, exactly the playing approach the Golden Fleece is designed around. A player whose entire touch vocabulary lives in the guitar’s volume control is the ideal Fleece customer, and it is not a coincidence that he is also a documented Mythos Mjolnir user. Buck runs two Mythos boxes, which is about as strong an endorsement as a small builder gets.
Joey Landreth (The Bros. Landreth)
Landreth’s link to Mythos predates most of the company’s catalogue. Broyles has said on the record that gifting pedals to Landreth and to Rob Chapman in the early years was the moment people started reaching out to him — that those two gifts are part of why Mythos exists at all.
On the Fleece specifically, the evidence is Landreth’s own Instagram post: “#newfavourite alert!!!! And yes, this is how I run it. @mythospedals #goldenfleece.” He liked it enough that Mythos eventually built him a signature variant of the circuit, which we cover in the variants section below.
One naming trap worth flagging, because search engines fall into it constantly: Joey Landreth is not Sonny Landreth. They are unrelated players. Sonny is the Louisiana slide legend; Joey is the Winnipeg-born singer and guitarist of The Bros. Landreth, known for open-C tuning and a slide approach entirely his own.
Ariel Posen
Posen appears in Mythos’s own demo video, “Mythos Pedals Golden Fleece Fuzz played by Ariel Posen.” That is a manufacturer video rather than an independent sighting, and we flag it as such — but Posen is a working slide and lap-style player whose whole tonal identity is built on dynamics and volume-knob control, and hearing the pedal in his hands is genuinely the most useful demo available for understanding what it does.
Peter “Danish Pete” Honoré
Documented via an Instagram post showing the pedal on his board. Honoré is best known to most players through Andertons, where his session-player instincts and Telecaster habits have made him one of the more trusted demo voices in the UK.
Anthony Da Costa
The most useful entry of the five, because Da Costa published his entire signal chain. Posting a travel board built for David Wax Museum shows, he listed it in order: TC Electronic Polytune Mini, then a BJFE Honey Bee overdrive (the original hand-wired version), then the Mythos Golden Fleece, then an Eventide H9 for modulation and synth textures, then a Strymon El Capistan and Flint, powered by a Strymon Ojai.
That chain is instructive in two directions. It shows the Fleece placed early, ahead of everything time-based — correct. And it shows a Polytune Mini in front of it, which is a buffered tuner, which by Mythos’s own rules is the one thing you are told not to do. Working players make that compromise constantly and live with it. Worth knowing that even a documented user’s board is not automatically a template.
Who is not on this list
Nels Cline, as covered above — he used the Alan Yee original, not the Mythos. And no arena headliner of any kind. If you want a fuzz with a stadium pedigree attached, the Jimi Hendrix Fuzz Face and the Big Muff Pi exist for exactly that reason. The Golden Fleece’s constituency is session players, slide players and touring sidemen, and the artist list reflects that honestly.
The variant map: standard, High Road, AU-79 — and the rest
Mythos have made a lot of Golden Fleeces. Their own FAQ page reduces the chaos to three main circuits, and it is the most useful paragraph on the entire website.
The standard Golden Fleece
Mythos describe it as “a wooly/compressed feeling fuzz that has a definite bloom on the attack of the note.” That word bloom is the one to hold onto. Hit a chord and the fuzz swells slightly after the initial transient rather than arriving all at once. It is the most fuzz-like and the most vintage-feeling of the three.
The High Road
The Joey Landreth signature version, built around the same circuit with targeted changes, and released alongside Landreth’s single “Forgiveness.”
Broyles’s own description of the brief is refreshingly plain: “Joey wanted it to feel more like a Silicon Fuzz of yesteryear and it gets that in spades.” Where the standard blooms, the High Road hits immediately — a more focused, more defined, spittier attack with a more aggressive character. Mythos are explicit that both clean up identically and share very similar EQ, so this is a difference of attack and focus rather than of voice.
If you play slide, or if you play in a busy mix where a blooming attack gets lost, the High Road is arguably the better pedal. It was a limited release, so availability is a lottery.
The AU-79
A Mass Street Music exclusive, and the most interesting of the three historically. Broyles calls it “an homage to the first fleece I ever made, and is more true to the inspiration of this circuit” — in other words, this is the version closest to the Alan Yee original, before years of refinement pulled the standard Fleece in a fuzzier direction.
Practically: considerably less gain, smoother top end, less bass, and in Broyles’s words “more of an overdrive meets fuzz, even with the guitar volume all the way up.” He rates it as the best of the three for stacking with other drives, and he is right — the standard Fleece’s bass content and compression make it awkward to stack, while the AU-79 behaves much more like a slightly unhinged overdrive.
The name is a periodic-table joke. Au is gold, 79 is its atomic number, and the enclosure is finished accordingly. It is a mini-format, through-hole, hand-built unit, and it has gone in and out of stock at Mass Street Music since roughly 2020.
Everything else
Beyond those three circuits there are cosmetic and format runs: an original large-enclosure Golden Fleece that predates the current mini format, a “Blackout” finish, various 2022-onward artwork revisions. Reverb and Equipboard list several of these as separate products, which is why searching for a used one throws up an alarming number of near-identical results.
The buying rule that follows from this: when you find a used listing, identify which of the three circuits you are actually looking at before you bid. A cheap “Golden Fleece” that turns out to be an AU-79 is a fundamentally different pedal to the one demoed in the video you watched — quieter, tamer, more overdrive than fuzz. Neither is worse. They are not interchangeable.
Tone recipes
1. The default: “thick blanket”
Pedal: More at 12 o’clock. Guitar: volume at 10, tone at 10. Amp: clean or very lightly broken up.
This is the sound the pedal is famous for — a wooly, thick blanket of fuzz with real weight underneath it. Owners describe unity gain arriving around 10 o’clock on the More knob, so at noon you are already pushing the front of the amp meaningfully. Play a first-position E and let it hang; that swelling, blooming decay is the whole pedal in one note.
2. Rhythm: roll it back to 6
Pedal: unchanged. Guitar: volume at 6.
The critical move. Rolling the guitar volume to around six turns the Fleece into a harmonically rich overdrive with the fuzz character sitting underneath rather than on top — usable for chording, comping and rhythm work where full fuzz would smear. Owners specifically call this out as the rhythm setting, and it only works because there is no buffer in front of the pedal. If you try this and the sound merely gets quieter without cleaning up, you have a buffer problem. Go and find it.
3. Lead: the volume-knob boost
Set your rhythm sound with the guitar at 6, then hit 10 for the solo. No footswitch. This is how the pedal was designed to be used and it is the single biggest argument for owning one: your lead boost is already in your right hand, with no lag, no tap-dance and no second pedal.
4. Fusion voice: stack into a smooth drive
Pedal: More at 11. Guitar: volume 7–8. After it: a smooth, low-gain amp-like overdrive.
Owners report the Fleece working well for fusion lead lines when paired with a Zen Drive-style circuit, using guitar volume to move between comping and soloing. Any smooth mid-forward drive works here; a Nobels ODR-1 after the Fleece does the same job with a broader mid picture. Note that this is one of the few stacking arrangements the standard Fleece is genuinely good at — for most stacking duties the AU-79 is the better tool.
5. Maximum: dime everything into a pushed amp
Pedal: More fully up. Guitar: everything at 10. Amp: already breaking up.
Mythos’s own recommendation, and the loudest the pedal gets: “With everything dimed it’s a powerful blooming fuzz sound that sounds great hitting a pushed amplifier.” Owners warn about exactly how loud this is — the Fleece has a lot of output on tap and pairs best with a clean amp that can absorb it. A Deluxe Reverb-class amp on the edge of breakup is the classic pairing.
6. Taming a bass-heavy rig
Pedal: More at 11. Guitar: volume 8, tone rolled back to 7.
The most common criticism of the Fleece is that it can be too bassy and too loud for some rigs. Counter-intuitively, rolling the guitar tone back slightly rather than the volume often fixes it, because you are attenuating the highs feeding the clipping stage and shifting the whole balance rather than reducing drive. Humbucker players in dark rooms should try this before concluding the pedal is muddy.
Recipes for a one-knob pedal look strange written down, because most of the instruction is about the guitar rather than the pedal. That is the correct proportion. Every setting below assumes the Fleece is first in the chain with no buffer ahead of it.
How it compares
Versus a germanium Fuzz Face
The obvious comparison, and the closest in philosophy. Both live in your guitar volume, both hate buffers, both are simple circuits with big personalities. Owners comparing the Fleece against an Analog Man Sun Face describe the Fleece as offering thick fuzz but with fewer high frequencies and fewer audible harmonics — darker and heavier where the Sun Face is more open and more sparkly on top.
The counter-argument for the Fleece: a germanium Fuzz Face is temperature-sensitive and bias-dependent, and a hot stage will change how it sounds mid-set. The Fleece uses diodes rather than a matched germanium transistor pair for its clipping, which makes it far more predictable. You trade some of the magic for reliability.
Versus a Big Muff
Not really the same category, but people cross-shop them anyway. A Big Muff Pi is a four-transistor sustain machine with a mid-scooping tone stack — it is a wall, and it does not clean up. The Fleece has no tone control, cleans up completely and does not scoop your mids. If you need a fuzz that sits under a vocal in a three-piece, the Fleece is the better answer. If you need a fuzz that becomes the entire song, buy the Muff. The Nano Big Muff is the more relevant comparison purely on footprint.
Versus the Mythos Mjolnir
These are the two Mythos pedals most likely to end up on the same board, and they solve completely different problems. The Mjolnir is a Klon-derived transparent overdrive with Gain, Treble and Output, buffered bypass and 25 mA draw. The Fleece is a one-knob fuzz with true bypass and under 10 mA.
Critically, they have opposite placement rules: the Mjolnir works anywhere and the Fleece must go first. Run both, and the order is fixed — Fleece, then Mjolnir. Reversed, the Mjolnir’s buffer sits in front of the Fleece and ruins it, even when the Mjolnir is switched off. Chris Buck runs both, and this is the correct order for them.
Versus the Greer Lightspeed
Not a competitor so much as a natural companion. The Greer Lightspeed is a transparent always-on low-gain drive designed to be forgotten about; the Fleece is a personality pedal designed to be interacted with constantly. Equipboard’s “used with” data shows the two appearing on the same boards, which makes sense — Fleece first, Lightspeed after, and you have a two-pedal dirt rig that covers almost everything, with the Lightspeed cleaning up the Fleece’s output into a more conventionally amp-like tone.
Versus the Wampler Tumnus
Included specifically as a warning rather than a comparison. The Tumnus is a fine mini overdrive and a natural pedalboard neighbour on footprint alone — and it is buffered bypass, which means it is the single most likely pedal to be silently destroying your Golden Fleece’s response. If you own both, the Fleece goes in front. Always.
Versus a modern multi-mode fuzz
A Keeley Fuzz Bender or a ZVEX Fuzz Factory gives you bias controls, EQ, blend, multiple voices — everything the Fleece deliberately withholds. If you want to shape a fuzz sound with knobs, buy one of those and enjoy it. The Fleece’s entire proposition is that shaping happens on the guitar. Those are irreconcilable design philosophies, and neither is wrong.
Versus the Vemuram Myriad
Both are boutique, both are expensive per gram, both have famous-adjacent origin stories. The Vemuram Myriad gives you full control and a heavily worked-over voicing at a much higher price. The Fleece gives you one knob at $139. For players who genuinely use their volume control, the cheaper pedal is arguably the more expressive one.
Versus a budget mini fuzz
A JHS 3 Series Fuzz costs a third as much and gives you a tone control. What you do not get is the specific NOS germanium diode Broyles hand-picks, the hand-built US construction, or that particular bloom. Whether that gap is worth roughly $100 depends entirely on whether you can hear it in your rig. Play both if you can.
Buying guide
New
$139 direct from Mythos as of September 2026, though the product page currently reads sold out — a recurring situation with a small builder and a best-selling pedal. Dealer stock circulates through the usual boutique retailers and stock tends to reappear in batches rather than continuously. Mythos ship worldwide, but European buyers should budget for VAT and import handling, which has been a live complaint against Mythos purchases generally.
Used
Aggregated listings start around $117, which is a strikingly small discount on a $139 pedal — roughly 15 percent depreciation. That number tells you something real: people who buy Golden Fleeces mostly keep them, and the ones that reach the used market get bought quickly.
Three things to check on any used listing. First, which circuit — standard, High Road or AU-79, as covered above. Second, enclosure format, since the earlier large-box version predates the current mini and is a different physical proposition on a crowded board. Third, modifications, because the Fleece is a popular DIY tinkering target and the Mythos warranty is void on any modified unit — and does not transfer to a second owner regardless.
What you are actually paying for
Hand assembly in Tennessee. A selected NOS germanium diode that is genuinely scarce and genuinely affects the voice. An enclosure small enough to fit anywhere. And a design decision — one knob, no options — that a larger company would never sign off on because it makes the pedal harder to sell.
Honest negatives
It can be too much. The most consistent criticism, and the only one that appears in aggregated review data, is too much bass and too much gain for some tastes. It is a loud, thick pedal. DIY builders working with the topology have gone as far as swapping capacitors specifically to reduce flabbiness, which tells you the low end is a real characteristic and not just a matter of amp settings.
The buffer rule is a genuine constraint. If you run a switching system, a buffered tuner you love, a wireless unit or a complex board with a fixed layout, the Fleece imposes a real limitation on you. It is not a pedal you can drop anywhere.
It picks up radio. Mythos say this outright in their own AU-79 dealer copy: the Fleece is a clone of a very simple vintage-style fuzz and, like the vintage units, it is sensitive to your rig and your power situation and can pick up radio signals. Poor power or a bad cable will make itself heard.
The footswitch pops. Mythos use a mechanical 3PDT by choice and Broyles has publicly refused to move to relay soft-touch switching. Their official advice, verbatim, is to “crank up and rock out and embrace the pop.” Most popping is capacitors discharging and settles after a few actuations, but if silent switching is a requirement, this is the wrong builder for you entirely.
The warranty does not transfer. Limited lifetime to the original purchaser only. Buy used and you are on your own.
No tone control means no tone control. If your amp is dark and your guitar has humbuckers, the pedal will not rescue you. There is nothing to turn.
Who should not buy this pedal
Anybody who does not use their guitar’s volume knob. This is not a snobbish point, it is a practical one: if you play with the volume on 10 at all times, you will hear one sound from this pedal and it will cost you $139 for a single unchangeable fuzz tone. Every other player who has ever loved a Golden Fleece loved it for the range that lives between 4 and 10 on the volume pot.
Also: metal and modern high-gain players (this is a vintage-voiced dirt box, not a tight distortion), anyone with a fixed board layout that cannot accommodate a first-in-chain true-bypass pedal, and anyone who wants to dial a fuzz sound in rather than play one in.
Ownership notes
Power. 9V DC centre negative, isolated output, full stop. Never 18V — Mythos warn that overvolting will kill the pedal and that older units in particular were built to 9V tolerances only. Their recommended supplies are Voodoo Lab, CIOKS and Truetone. Notably, Broyles has said publicly that “strymon supplies don’t play with some of our fuzzes,” which is a rare and useful piece of manufacturer candour given how common Strymon supplies are. If your Fleece is noisy on a Strymon brick, try another output or another supply before assuming the pedal is faulty.
Cables. Mythos specifically call out cable quality alongside power. A simple, unbuffered, high-impedance front end is exactly the circuit that will reveal a marginal cable.
Repairs. Mythos maintain a repair page and will handle out-of-warranty work for a fee where a repair is possible. All repairs are subject to parts availability, which for a pedal built around NOS germanium is a caveat with teeth.
Board placement, one more time. First. Before the tuner if the tuner is buffered. Before everything.
Frequently asked questions
What does the one knob actually do?
Output level only. It sets how loud the pedal is, and nothing else. It does not control gain, drive, fuzz amount or tone. Unity gain sits around 10 o’clock; past that you are pushing the front of your amp harder, which will indirectly increase perceived gain if the amp is already working.
Is it a fuzz, an overdrive or a distortion?
All three, depending on your guitar volume. Mythos describe it as blending fuzz, distortion and overdrive in one box. Rolled back it is a rich overdrive; wide open it is a thick, blooming fuzz. The transition is continuous rather than switched.
Does it have to go first in the chain?
Effectively yes. Mythos say all Golden Fleece variations need to sit before any buffer, and that includes buffered tuners, buffered-bypass pedals that are switched off, and the input buffers on loop switchers. It does not strictly have to be the very first item, but it must be before the first buffer, and on most modern boards that amounts to the same thing.
Is it true bypass or buffered?
True bypass. Mythos state this on the product page and it is the only sensible choice for a circuit this sensitive to what precedes it. You may find third-party listings claiming buffered bypass — one large gear database currently does — but the manufacturer’s own specification says true bypass, and the manufacturer wins.
What is the difference between the Golden Fleece, the High Road and the AU-79?
Three circuits from one family. The standard is wooly and compressed with a definite bloom on the note attack. The High Road, a Joey Landreth signature, has a more immediate, focused and spitty attack in the manner of a vintage silicon fuzz — same EQ, same cleanup, different feel. The AU-79 is a Mass Street Music exclusive modelled on the very first Fleece Broyles built: less gain, less bass, smoother top end, more overdrive than fuzz, and the best of the three for stacking with other drives.
Can I run it at 18 volts?
No. 9V DC centre negative only, under 10 mA, no battery. Mythos are explicit that an 18V supply will destroy the pedal.
Did Nels Cline use one?
No. Cline used the Alan Yee “Fuzzy Nuts,” the extremely rare original circuit that Broyles reverse-engineered to create the Golden Fleece. The Fleece owes its existence to that lineage, but Cline is a documented user of the Yee pedal, not the Mythos. The players actually documented on the Golden Fleece are Chris Buck, Joey Landreth, Ariel Posen, Peter Honoré and Anthony Da Costa.
Why does it hum, buzz or pick up radio?
Because it is a faithful clone of a very simple vintage-style fuzz, and those circuits behave this way. Mythos say so themselves. Check your power supply first — an isolated output from a Voodoo Lab, CIOKS or Truetone unit, and specifically not a Strymon supply, which Broyles has said does not agree with some Mythos fuzzes. Then check your cables. Then check what is in front of the pedal.
Is it worth $139 when a JHS 3 Series Fuzz is under $100?
If you use your volume knob, yes — the Fleece’s whole value proposition is the range it gives you between 4 and 10, and that range is unusually wide. If you do not, no. Buy the cheaper pedal with a tone control and enjoy it. The used market at around $117 barely moves the calculation, which is itself a comment on how rarely these get sold on.