Tools, Tones and Toys for Guitarists
For #fuzzfriday I present to you the Flying Guillotine Fuzz, designed by Freppo over on FSB. Here’s what he had to say about it on his blog: The front end, tonestack and the output stage are all borrowed from the Big Muff, but the two Muff gainstages is replaced with a discrete op amp (by … Read more
Got a request for an active DI, which coincided with a project I’m working on, so it seemed like a good idea. This one’s designed by Samuel Groner and modified by Jack Orman. The schematic came from his blog and can be found here, along with some other info about the circuit.
Here’s a simple overdrive circuit adapted from the National Semiconductor “Ultra High Gain Audio Amplifier” and Jack Orman’s “Minibooster” by Andrew Carrell (Dragonfly). It should easily fit in a 1590a.
Here’s a simple compressor design by Jon Patton (aka midwayfair) that’s good for guitar and bass. In Jon’s words: The Bearhug is a tonally transparent, ultra-quiet, tiny, and easy-to-build compressor. It occupies some middle ground between the ultra-subtle compressors like the Flatline/Afterlife and Orange Squeezer and the super squishy compressors like the Ross. For more … Read more
The Tres Hombres is a distortion/fuzz designed by Marcelo Trípodi on the DIYStompboxes forum. In a nut shell, it’s three similar germanium transistor stages with fuzz and volume controls. There’s also a switch to add an extra capacitor at the input to fatten up the sound. Marcelo recommends 2SA101 transistors with an hFE of 50 … Read more
Here’s the layout for #fuzzfriday! The F-1 Fuzz Tone is one of Kay’s budget effects from the 60s housed in a plastic treadle pedal. Essentially it’s the poor man’s Univox Super Fuzz. The treadle would control the Tone pot, with the overall level of the effect fixed at max. This isn’t that big of an … Read more
The FX25 was initially produced by DOD in the early 80s and is an OTA-based envelope filter/auto-wah. It’s a fairly tweakable and you can find various mods on other sites, but this is for the stock layout. The original switching circuitry has been removed, so you can use true-bypass. An LM1458 is listed in the … Read more
Here’s a rare one from the 70s by Ibanez. It was originally marketed as the OD-850 Overdrive II (not to be confused with the OD-855). But since the nature of this pedal is more distortion/fuzz territory, it wasn’t a great name and it was changed to the Dirt Box. Whatever you want to call it, … Read more
Here’s a very nice sounding British-style overdrive pedal from Boot-Leg Effects in Japan. It uses three-quarters of a TL074 quad op-amp, as well as germanium diodes (most likely 1N60s). Original units use an electrolytic 470n capacitor, but I’ve laid out the board for a film cap (though the PCB has pads for an electrolytic). I’ve … Read more
The Fuzz-Stainer is a pretty rare fuzz box made by Sam Ash in the 70s. Don’t confuse this with the Sam Ash Fuzzz Boxx/AstroTone, as it’s a different circuit. Original units used 2N5173 transistors with BCE pinouts. I’ve made 2 versions of the layout, one for BCE transistors (on the right) and one for CBE … Read more