Great Eastern FX have built a reputation for doing things differently. Their pedals don’t just chase vintage tone, they refine it, making classic ideas feel alive and usable for modern players. The Focus Fuzz Deluxe and XO Variable Crossover are two perfect examples — one breathing new life into fuzz, the other quietly reinventing how your entire pedalboard works.
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Focus Fuzz Deluxe
The Focus Fuzz Deluxe is the latest evolution of Great Eastern FX’s germanium fuzz lineage, and it shows. While it still delivers that warm, broken-amp growl players crave, it’s been fine-tuned for real-world use — thick, dynamic, and never lost in the mix. A dedicated pre-fuzz gain stage ensures consistency across rigs and venues, giving fuzz-lovers something they can finally rely on live.
The pedal offers four distinct modes, each with a personality of its own.
Boost adds heft to your clean sound, giving your tone a fuller low end. The Focus control brings in a touch of edge or extra presence, depending on how much bite you want in the room.
Drive transforms the Focus Fuzz into a gritty, amp-like overdrive that responds beautifully to picking dynamics. It’s the sort of sound that makes you forget you’re not plugged straight into a cranked vintage combo.
Fuzz mode brings the circuit’s vintage heart to life. The germanium fuzz engine spits, sags, and sings — but always stays articulate enough to cut through a dense mix. With the Fuzz control engaged, you can move from velvety sustain to chaotic, splattering filth in seconds.
Overtone mode is where things get wild. It adds a bold octave-up effect that borders on the explosive. Chords can get unpredictable, but the payoff is huge — expressive, harmonic textures that turn solos into cinematic events.
The Focus Fuzz Deluxe manages to blend vintage soul with modern flexibility, proving that fuzz can be both unruly and refined.
XO Variable Crossover
Then there’s the XO Variable Crossover — a pedal that doesn’t actually make sound itself, but instead reimagines how you use every other pedal you own. Marketed as “a pedal for your pedals,” the XO splits your signal into two frequency bands — low and high — letting you route them through entirely different effects chains before blending them back together.
It’s a deceptively simple concept that opens up an entirely new world of tone-shaping. Want your low end to stay clean and ambient while your highs tear through with distortion? Done. Prefer to feed your lows through reverb and your highs through modulation? Easy. The Crossover Frequency knob lets you define where that split happens, and the Return Balance control blends it all back together with surgical precision.
To really see what it can do, we paired the XO with an Electro-Harmonix POG — and the results were next-level. Running the POG on the high band while keeping the lows dry produced rich, organ-like harmonics with tight, defined bottom end. Suddenly, the idea of splitting a signal wasn’t just clever; it was creatively addictive.
The XO also includes a Range toggle that optimises its crossover points for guitar or bass, and a Phase Invert switch to correct (or creatively misuse) phase interactions between parallel chains. Add a Dry Blend to reintegrate your original signal, and you’ve got a pedalboard powerhouse that’s equal parts studio tool and playground.
In practice, the XO Variable Crossover feels less like a utility box and more like a creative companion that makes you rethink what’s possible with your current setup.
Modern precision meets vintage attitude
Together, the Focus Fuzz Deluxe and XO Variable Crossover show just how forward-thinking Great Eastern FX have become. One takes the most temperamental effect in rock history and makes it stage-ready, while the other flips traditional pedalboard logic on its head. Both pedals share the same ethos — fewer gimmicks, more control, and a genuine passion for sound.
For players chasing tone that’s both classic and clever, Great Eastern FX might just be your next obsession.
