Glenn Snoddy, the studio engineer who was at the controls for the historic Nashville recording session that inadvertently produced the sound that became known as the fuzz tone, died on Monday at his home in Murfreesboro, Tenn. He was 96.
His death was confirmed by his daughter Dianne Mayo.
Though typically associated with ’60s rock — and maybe most famously with Keith Richards’s fat, buzzing guitar riff on the Rolling Stones’ 1965 hit “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” — the fuzz tone emerged from the studio session that produced the country singer Marty Robbins’s otherwise euphonious 1961 single “Don’t Worry.”
A malfunction in the console through which the playing of the electric bass guitarist Grady Martin was being transmitted caused the original fuzz-tone effect, Mr. Snoddy said in a video made by the National Association of Music Merchants in 2014.
The low, reverberant sound produced by Mr. Martin’s bass on “Don’t Worry,” which reached the country Top 10, was reminiscent of a rumbling car muffler.
Overriding the objections of Mr. Martin, who felt that another take was needed to fix what he considered an unwelcome sonic intrusion, Mr. Snoddy and Don Law, the session’s producer, believed they had a unique sound on their hands and decided to leave their putatively flawed recording intact.
Their instincts paid off, especially after Mr. Snoddy designed a device that could reproduce a fuzz tone on demand.
The resulting piece of equipment — a preamp commonly known as a fuzz box that was sold by the Gibson guitar company, for which Mr. Snoddy received royalties — allowed guitarists to change the tone of their instrument from clean to dirty with the tap of a foot pedal.
Before long the fuzz tone had become a hallmark of ’60s guitar rock, especially among its more psychedelic exponents, like the Jimi Hendrix Experience and Cream. Loud and arresting, the fuzz tone was well suited to expressions of rock’s more disruptive and rebellious impulses
