Tools, Tones and Toys for Guitarists
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
General The Multiplex Echo Machine is a Tape Echo simulator Pedal. Its basically a dual digital delay with an analog sound. So two delay channels are mixed together (Delay1 and Delay2 knobs) The Pedal features 3 different modes and a speed footswitch (to increase the delay time steadily) There is also a modulation addon (with … Read more
Got several requests for this one. The MI Audio Crunch Box is a versatile distortion box, designed to sound like a cranked Marshall. It’s very similar to the Marshall Guv’nor, but with a Rat style tone control. Production models have the Presence control as a trimmer internally, but it makes sense to me to have … Read more
Here’s the ColorSound Wah-Wah. I hadn’t laid out a wah before, probably because I haven’t built one myself before, and I don’t use one much when I play. Anyway, the ColorSound Wah-Wah is pretty simple and sounds very good. What makes it unique is that it doesn’t use an inductor like most wah circuits. This … Read more
The fOXX Tone Machine is a classic fuzz box and a very versatile octave effect as well. Pretty standard controls, and the toggle switch controls the octave effect. I’ve laid this out for onboard pots and octave switch, and added polarity protection and power filtering. 2N3904s or 2N2222s can also be used in place of … Read more
The DOD 280 was DOD’s first compression pedal made in the late ’70s through the ’80s. A great sounding compressor, this fairly simple circuit uses an LDR and LED combination (in the form of a VTL5C2) to compress the signal. This one’s laid out for on board right angle PCB pots, mounted from the solder … Read more
Haven’t done a Big Muff layout in a while. This is the Triangle version again and is pretty much the same layout as before, but I changed the orientation of the Tone pot. I was going to build this myself and realized that I didn’t like how far down the Tone pot was from the … Read more
A while back Brian Wampler shared a bunch of mods to the classic MXR Distortion Plus circuit in Premiere Guitar magazine. It adds a tone control, a switchable soft clipping stage, a compression switch, and a bass boost switch.
The EHX Germanium OD offers 60s overdrive tones using a combination of germanium and silicon transistors (all PNP). All 3 pots control the voltage is some way. The Bias pot controls the amount of voltage that reaches the Gain control, which in turn controls the remaining voltage that gets to the germanium transistor. The Volts … Read more
