Tools, Tones and Toys for Guitarists
I haven’t looked at an Ampeg Scrambler in a long time – in fact, my first attempt a few years ago went nowhere and ended up in the bin. It’s a pretty wild octave fuzz from the late sixties; not a huge number were produced so the originals are expensive now. Scramblers were designed … Read more
Happy Fuzz Friday! Here’s a big one that hopefully makes up for my absence lately. Sounds great on bass and guitar. From Darkglass: The Duality is a unique fuzz pedal that contains two discrete fuzz circuits—a gated saw-tooth wave and a raunchy high-gain sound—which can be mixed together to yield a vast selection of distinct … Read more
The Colorsound Bass Fuzz is a Big Muff style circuit, missing a pair of diodes and the gain recovery stage, not unlike a Jumbo Tone Bender. Caps have been enlarged to suit the bass guitar. COLORSOUND BASS FUZZ – VERO LAYOUT
From the source: At last… a classic fuzztone for bass! This transistorized beauty uses germanium diodes for soft knee clipping and actually boosts the bottom to give you awesome sustain with rich creamy fuzztone. Wonderful overtones and plenty of thump to boot.
Time for some bass distortion. This one’s a RAT with an input buffer and soft clipping instead of hard. Apparently these were built on the same PCB as the Fat Cat and LA Metal. For a drilling template just use the Fat Cat one.
Always need more bass effects, right? This was one of the first bass ODs to have a clean blend. Should be an easy fit in a 1590B. Here’s the schematic for reference.
Happy Fuzz Friday! Here’s the now discontinued Ram the Manparts from Fuzzrocious. It’s a 386-based fuzz/distortion with a voltage starve control, gain toggle, and volume control and sounds pretty killer on guitar and bass. Should be a quick build and a nice fit in a 1590B.
Lot of requests for this one after I posted the Stingray pre a few weeks ago, so here’s the Sabre II. Pretty similar the the Stingray but with a few value differences and extra resistor in the feedback loop, and the added bright switch.
Had several requests for on-board bass preamps and what better place to start than the original StingRay circuit? Simple 2 band-EQ with low current draw and should be small enough to tuck into the control cavity of whatever bass you’re wanting to add it to. Other single opamps can be used, but the current draw … Read more
Got a request for the DI portion of the Hartke LH1000 bass amp. This is more or less that, but with a simplified power section. In the amp this runs off a bipolar 15 volt supply, but I would think it would also work with regular 9 volt supply. There’s not an unbalanced output, but … Read more