I’ve seen products like this that claim to un-buffer a guitar signal to allow impedance sensitive pedals to be places anywhere in the chain without consequence.
How do these circuits work and could anyone point me in the direction of a DIY solution?
I built the Aion Ascalon (Kingtone Octaland clone) but I find it underwhelming. Even at full blend, the octave is not nearly pronounced enough to create the sound I'm looking for - (that extremely vocal effect that Jimi got on Band of Gypsies). I've watched a gazillion octave fuzz demos online and the pedal that gets closest to the tone I'm after seems to be the Mythos Argo, which is a modified C.O.B. I haven't found any schematics for the Argo, but I've seen some vero layouts for the C.O.B. , so I'm going to breadboard that as a starting point.
Does anyone know how much different the Argo is from the C.O.B.? Any interesting modifications that I should try?
PPCB “Chickenhead” (NPN Rangemaster) on the right into “Pauper” (Prince of Tone) on the left. My daughter’s hand drawn tribute to the family cat (who’s currently 17 years old with lung cancer).
The “Claws” switch is a 3n3 cap on the Rangemaster output that I added to soften the extreme highs with certain guitar/amp combinations - there’s a tiny drop in level as well, but the circuit has so much gain to start with, it’s a non issue.
The footswitches are wired to allow each side to be enabled/bypassed individually and the center switch is a master bypass. The LEDs are powered independently, so you can see which sides are active before switching the pedal on. The channel LEDs are actually bright orange, but my phone camera didn’t capture that.
I didn’t bother with an order switch because the GE transistor wants to be be first in the chain always.
I’m mostly happy with the graphics other than the “SASS” and “FRAS” which need to to a bit bolder.
LOVE how this box sounds!
It’s an Ge NPN fuzz face and everything sounds great except when the guitar volume pot is turned to the bottom of the range, I get oscillation that gets lower in pitch as the pot reaches the end of its range. It is definitely affected when I touch the connections on the breadboard, where the pitch of the Noise changes randomly but normalizes when the connections are all seated .
Transistors are biased with roughly 4.5v at collector for Q2 and 0.7v at collector for Q1.
I’ve tried other transistors and the circuit behaves the same. Any ideas?
I just received an order of well sorted NPN ge transistors from an ebay seller and I'm super impressed. All of them are reasonably low leakage and between 60-120 hfe - I'll be building several rangemasters and a couple of classic GE Fuzz Face.
There is one outlier though, an ASY74 that measures an adjusted hfe of 245 and only 34uA leakage. I'm wondering what you would suggest as an interesting project that would take advantage of it's unusual specs?
This article (and others I've seen) suggests using Miller Caps between the base and collector to control HF noise.
https://electrosmash.com/germanium-fuzz
I haven't found much in the way of information about type and values for this application, other than to use silver mica caps and a broad range of small values. Can anyone suggest what values I should try and a good source (in Canada)? Digkey stocks mica caps but they start around $10 EACH! what's up with that?
Also wondering if this is just a Germanium thing or are they helpful in a silicon FF as well?
Working on my first PNP circuit and I’m having trouble figuring out what I’m doing wrong. I’ve built the circuit exactly as per the attached schematic. But I’m getting roughly 9V at every leg of both transistors. I’m assuming it’s an issue with the way I’m inverting the power and ground rails to achieve positive ground. I’m using a coppersound DIY board and I’ve reversed the 9V and ground with jumpers, which I thought would be the equivalent and reversing polarity on a battery. Transistors are Mulllard T1 type and I’ve verified that Pinout is correct (red dot=collector).
I’ve attached the schematic and a picture of my circuit. Any help would be appreciated, thanks.
EDIT: after posting, I noticed that C3 was not properly connected to the volume pot and has since been corrected. Of course this doesn’t change the bias voltage problem
EDIT 2: as pointed out, I had 470k instead of 470 ohms. That has been corrected, but still no change in the voltage readings.