Tools, Tones and Toys for Guitarists
Here’s another one of Nick Greer’s offerings. Like Sean over at Lovepedal, he seems to be getting a lot of mileage out of the Electra circuit. I’ve laid this out for on-board pots with the board mounted vertically like this: Photo by Bob Scott/negatron.org I saw on the Greer Amps website that a special version … Read more
While we’re on the subject of the Companion Fuzz, here’s an adaption by British pedal company Fredric Effects. It replaces the fixed tone stack of the original FY-2 with a Big Muff tone stack, and adds a LPB-1 booster after the volume pot to increase the volume.
The epitome of buzzsaw fuzz tones, the Shin Ei Companion Fuzz has become a highly sought after fuzz box. The one drawback to the FY-2 is the tone stack between the Fuzz and Volume controls. Besides not being controllable, it drops the volume of the effect below unity. I’ve drawn up a stock layout, as … Read more
I came across the schematic for this while looking through RunOffGroove.com. It’s an interesting mashup of Tim Escobedo’s Idiot Wah and the LFO section from the EA Tremolo to produce a faux phaser effect, and apparently works very well at higher speeds.
Got a request for this one. The Zendrive is a low-to-medium gain overdrive, delivering blues to jazz tones. It has an interesting clipping section, using a combination of diodes and MOSFETs in an asymmetrical arrangement. I’ve drawn the layout to accommodate board mounted pots (from the solder-side) and it will fit easily in a 1590b.
Here’s a simple one for your Saturday. As the name implies, this is a simple buffer based around a JFET transistor. This layout follows the schematic from Jack Orman’s great article on Basic Buffers. Thought this would be useful if you want to add an input buffer to an existing pedal or to a project … Read more
The original DOD units had “balanced” XLR output as well as the normal 1/4″ jack and no footswitch. This has been adapted for stompbox use and could work well with acoustic guitar.
Here’s the original EHX Pulsar trem from the 70s (not to be confused with the modern Stereo Pulsar EHX manufactures today). It features Intensity and Speed controls as well as a switch to go between a hard and soft wavefrom. Original units often suffer from clock bleed from the LFO section. So I’ve drawn a … Read more
The Ross Distortion is very similar to two other famous distortion boxes of the late 70s (MXR Distortion +, DOD 250). However, it uses one side of a 4558 dual opamp instead of the single opamp (741) found in the the other two, and a few other tweaks in component values. There are two versions … Read more
Maxon released the OD808 in 1979 and it generates natural, mild overdrive tones and is similar to the TS808. Original units used MC1458P ICs, but I’ve listed JRC4558s as they’re likely to be on hand for many of you. Also the original diodes were Panasonic MA150. I’ve listed 1N4148s as a replacement, but socket and … Read more