Tools, Tones and Toys for Guitarists
For the blog’s 600th layout, here’s a new one that didn’t take long to get traced. Here’s EQD’s newest offering, the Westwood Translucent Drive Manipulator. Great for pushing your amp and giving a near clean boost. It features an active 2-band EQ and sounds great on bass as well as guitar.
Another brutal fuzz machine from Devi, and sounds great on bass and guitar. Pretty straight forward design–two cascaded transistor amplifier stages with a pre-gain control (intensity) and standard volume control. Pots are board mounted and it shouldn’t take all that long to throw together.
Got a bass fuzz for Fuzz Friday this week. It’s a gated fuzz with both clean and dirty level controls, an envelope jack to use with funk-style effects, and a soft/hard clipping switch. From the manufacturer: The Brown Dog enables you to produce rampaging waves of meat with your bass guitar while still keeping your … Read more
The Brassmaster was originally designed for bass and also picked up by guitarists. The circuit is very unique and originals are hard to come by. I was able to lay it out to fit in a 125B with board mounted pots.
Laying out Big Muff variations never gets old for me. This one uses germanium transistors in the two clipping stages (and predates the EQD Hoof which also uses germanium transistors) along with schottky diodes (1N6263s). Q4 is a FS25444, but the usual BMP transistor suspects will work as well (2N5088, MPSA18, BC549C, etc). Other than … Read more
“The Microtubes B3K is an unusual tool – a perfect combination of brutality and clarity. It delivers defined and powerful saturation in an intuitive format. There are no rules and no limits, so dig in and unleash your tone. ControlsLevel: Sets the volume of the overdriven signal.Drive: Sets the amount of saturation in the overdriven … Read more
For Fuzz Friday here’s the Revelation from Black Arts Toneworks. There are 2 versions of the Revelation: the Super Bass and Super Lead. The Super Bass is a stripped down Pharoah without the tone control, no clipping diodes in the 2nd gain stage, and an input gain control. The Super Lead version is the same … Read more
Another super rare Hornby Skewes pedal, so rare in fact I can’t even find a video for it. Similar to the treble booster, but boosts the bass frequencies instead of the treble. I’m certain just like any other vintage Hornby Skewes pedal it’s gonna sound great. Layout 1: Original PNP Layout 2: NPN Version
The ROG Ginger is an amp emulator designed to sound like the classic Ampeg SB-12 Portaflex. So it’s intended for bass, but sounds good with a guitar as well. Schematic, sound clips, and more info can be found in the ROG article. It’s laid out for board mounted pots will fit easily in a 125B … Read more
Here’s another one for the bass players. It’s a pretty handy EQ pedal from EWS. Originals come in a 1590a, and sadly I wasn’t able to duplicate that here, but it will fit fine in a 1590B with board mounted pots. Originals have the Volume control as an internal trimmer, but I’ve moved that to … Read more