Tools, Tones and Toys for Guitarists
For #FuzzFriday here’s Roger Mayer’s Axis Fuzz, and it’s the 100th fuzz effect on the blog. Maybe I should branch out more… It was designed by Roger in the late 60s for Jimi Hendrix, and is named after the title track of “Axis Bold as Love.” It uses a PNP silicon transistor for Q1 and … Read more
Today marks the one year anniversary of this blog. Thanks to everyone for your comments, verifying layouts, and just generally being really cool people. To celebrate, I give you a really cool and crazy delay, the Casper Electronics EchoBender. The EchoBender is a development of/modified Deep Blue Delay. I couldn’t quite get it to fit … Read more
The Octavia is one of the many legendary effects to come out of the late 60s. It is also one of the rarest pedals of the era, as there weren’t many built. Like most effects of its day, the Octavia is a positive ground effect. There are several schematics for it floating around, but the … Read more
I was trolling Google Images the other night looking for schematics and I stumbled across this. I think the only thing this reissue has in common with an original is the enclosure and graphics. It uses a single opamp with soft clipping and a Big Muff-style tone stack. If you use 9mm pots you could … Read more
This one’s for those of you trying to nail some Jimmy Page tones. The RAH emulates the HiWatt heads Jimmy used live in the early days of Zeppelin. It uses only 3 MOSFET transistors, and features a 3-band EQ section. I’m going to shut up now so you can hear Andy from PGS put this … Read more
Here’s a unique fuzz box from Italy for #fuzzfriday. Long, warm sustain like a Big Muff, but with better articulation when strumming chords. There seems to be a couple different ways to build this (circuit is the same, just a few components vary), and it’s ripe for modification. Using high gain silicon transistors like MPSA18 … Read more
I could have sworn I posted this back when I started this blog, but apparently not (hence the ‘old school’ pcb). It’s another of Nocentelli’s designs and somewhat similar to the Marvel Drive. Original schematic can be found on the FSB thread.
Here’s a cool variation of the Vox Repeat Percussion tremolo from EQD. It adds some extra controls to the original circuit for more versatility and control. I had a hard time tracking down a schematic for this one and ended up just tracing the vero layout from the Tagboard Effects blog. So here you go … Read more
Here’s something interesting to do with some of those 4049UB chips. It’s a CMOS Big Muff (22/7 being the fractional equivalent of pi). Brian from ROG added a switch to the tone stack to allow for flat response and a super scooped response, in addition to the classic scooped mids. I’ve also drawn up a … Read more
I really enjoyed making the Big Muff Project file a couple months ago and thought it would be fun to make a similar project based on the MXR Distortion +/DOD OD250 circuit (in an attempt to combine the 2 names I call this project the Drivestortion). This circuit was also cloned by other pedal manufacturers … Read more