A few months ago, Alex and I made an
attempt to trace an old polish fuzz/distortion that looked incredibly
cool and was supposed to sound in the vein of a Rat or a Big Muff. Soon,
we realized that the circuit design was quite unique, not resembling anything else. It is basically a bootstrapped booster into a 741 op amp
running way above full tilt for op amp clipping. An offset null trimpot
is there to fine tune the gating and the sustain for the op amp. Then
the signal goes into a BJT powered Baxandall tone section with the bass
control fixed midway. The tone control is the Treble control in the
Baxandall network.
So far so good but
we failed just before the finish line…four of the resistor values was
impossible to figure out so we pot it to bed. A few months later Blue Colander Stompboxes entered the scene.. They traced two Satronik units
and posted a schematic on their DIY section of their website. That
helped us fill in the missing gaps!
Note
that several cap and resistor values varied through its lifespan as
well as the transistor selection. The differences are quite minor so the
sonic character shouldn’t that far off from unit to unit. The values in
the layout below are almost solely from AlexS and mine trace.
