Tools, Tones and Toys for Guitarists
It’s Fuzz Friday time again, and this week I give you the Ampeg Scrambler. This one’s a pretty rare one, even back when it was originally made in the late 60s. It’s a pretty crazy octave fuzz with a clean blend. Originals used 2N5306 for Q1, 3, and 4, and a BC169 for Q2, but … Read more
Got a request for this one. It’s the bass version of the Voodoo distortion. It’s a very popular bass effect, especially in Japan apparently, but also sounds great with guitar too. A transistor stage at the input pushes a Rat-like LM308 distortion section, followed by a Big Muff-style tone stack and a simple output buffer. … Read more
I got a request for the Fulltone Bassdrive, and upon examining the schematic for it and the Fulldrive, there’s only a few capacitor value changes between the two, which I’ll detail below. All that to say, here’s the Fulldrive 2 Mosfet. It’s a Tube Screamer circuit with some interesting mods on it. Schematic is easily … Read more
Here’s a non-Fuzz Face/Tone Bender offering from D*A*M for Fuzz Friday. It’s designed for bass, but sound great on guitar as well. It uses one half of a dual op amp to blend in clean signal, and the other half creates the distortion via soft clipping. You have 4 options for clipping diodes, germanium, silicon, … Read more
Here is a DIY project similar to the Carl Martin Compressor Limiter. There are 2 layouts: a large one that works at 9V and a smaller one where you need to decide a way to feed +/- 12V to the circuit (just a charge pump with regulators wouldn’t work with this circuit). You should read … Read more
Being primarily a bass player myself, I’ve wanted to build this one for a while, but didn’t really feel like messing with all the off board wiring of my first layout of this circuit. So I’ve drawn up a new layout with board mounted pots. I’ve also subbed a 2N5457 in place of the stock … Read more
Here’s one for my fellow bassists out there. It’s a transistor-ized version of the Fender Bassman preamp as modified by DeadAstronaut over on DIYSB. It’s laid out for board mounted pots and switch and will fit nicely in a 1590B.
