Madferret’s amazing and complete overhaul of those circuits that use low gain Ge transistors in darlington configuration to achieve fuzzy germanium bliss. This baby consumes 6 of your low gain/low loeak germaniums and adds not-completely-unlike big muff tone stack plus a recovery stage to keep the signal loud. Not to mention three different pots to tune it to your liking – including Choke control, Pregain and first stage Iintensity controls. It has six knobs, so you might want to use a big box for it. Or if you’re feeling adventurous, you can always try it out with 9mm pots and fit it in a 1590B 🙂
This one uses negative power supply, so wire it for battery only or use appropriate charge pump.
From Madferret: Credit where credit’s due by the way, this was based off the Germocide layout by Dragonfly, with ideas taken from all over the internet from places like DIYstompboxes, AMZ etc but especially from Mark’s blog as I seriously wouldn’t have a clue about making pedals if it weren’t for all the information from this site and all the input from everyone that uses it. Go team!
Possible mods:
-To get more gain from the recovery stage, decrease the value of 3K3 resistor coming from Q7 emitter, or increase the value of 15K at the Q7 collector. Or do both.
-If there’s too much fizz, try upping the 100p cap to 220p or 470p
-Lowest settings of Pregain and Intensity can be tweaked by swapping the 18K resistors for something like 4K7 or 10K.
(update 18.10.2019 – On the layout, there is a 100K resistor missing from the Q7 base to ground. This resistor can be fitted to get the circuit running as intended. I lost my source files in ’16, so to remedy this, i’d need to do a redraw. I may do it soonish… However, the layout is otherwise verified. Thanks to ColoradoSynthDoctor for verifying it and noticing the error!)
Madferret’s demo:
