Tools, Tones and Toys for Guitarists
It’s a special Fuzz Friday! My fabricated boards came in for the Dirt Transmitter, and I finally got the chance to verify them. So I made a video of the whole build process! Also, what’s more exciting than the build video is the launch of the new Effects Layouts store! It’s kind of a soft … Read more
The Geisha Drive (or just called Drive sometimes) was a limited run overdrive from Way Huge and is a great sounding circuit. It uses a quad opamp to form an input buffer stage, gain stage, followed by some hard clipping and a modified BMP tone stack, into the volume pot, followed by a gain recovery … Read more
Unique little distortion box from Bjorn. The original uses 1A1200 diodes (which are pretty big), but other (and smaller) silicon diodes can be used. Should fit nicely in a 1590B.
For Fuzz Friday here’s the Run Off Groove Whisker Biscuit–Big Muff meets Bazz Fuss. From the ROG site: The Whisker Biscuit is a hybrid of the Bazz Fuss and the Big Muff Pi. A single Bazz Fuss stage replaces the two clipping stages of the BMP. Smooth, super-long sustain, and good clean-up with the guitar volume knob … Read more
The Sentinel is a PT2399-based pitch modulator, delay, reverb and drone verb designed by Arnoud Philip (~arph) as part of the DIYSB 10th Anniversary design contest. It’s based on the Sewer Pipes ring-verb and the Noise Ensemble. Original thread here, schematic here. Should be able to squeeze it into a 1590B. Note: LED2 in the … Read more
The Ashbory bass was first introduced in 1986 and is/was a half scale (18″) fretless travel bass with a piezo pickup and built in preamp. That preamp is essentially a Baxendall tone stack feeding into the volume control, into an op amp based gain stage. I stumbled across the schematic and thought it would be a … Read more
Got another take on the bufferless Tube Screamer. DeadAstronaut has added some extra tone shaping options for tone, gain, and clipping. Pretty versatile tones on tap from light drive into heavier territory. He’s also got a PCB with board mounted pots and switches for sale on his site here if you don’t feel like wiring … Read more
For Fuzz Friday, here’s a really cool design from Parasit Studio: The 8-Bitar is a minimalistic octave down pedal with a 8-bit sound (glitchy and gated square wave fuzz). It’s small enough to fit inside a 1590A without any special parts.The design goal with this pedal was to achieve the core octave tone from the … Read more
Here’s an interesting one from Pigtronix. It uses a TL072 to push a CD4049, which is followed by another TL072 pushing a Rat-esque tone control. All the gain stages make for natural compression and tube-like tone without using clipping diodes. Schematic for reference on FSB here (note, I’ve linked the inputs of the unused stages of … Read more
Stumbled across this one over on the old La Revolution Deux blog. It’s a simplified version of the Diamond Compressor, removing the EQ and the blinking LED circuitry. Makes for a much smaller footprint and will fit nicely in either a 1590B or 125B. Here’s the schematic for reference.