Marigold Fuzz

VanWhy

Well-known member
Build Rating
5.00 star(s)
Okay, this thing rules. I've played hundreds of fuzz pedals, and this one has got to be in my top 5. I couldn't put it down. But your results may vary!

I splurged on the OC140 from Small Bear and thankfully it was super solid. Perfect hfe and very little leakage.

BOM says BC107 so I put a BC107B in there. Not sure an A or C would have made much difference.

For the Ge diode, I just threw in an old OA90 from my stash. Seems fine.

But everything turned out great. Sounds really good. A cool, vintage style fuzz. Gets super fuzzy but not blown out. And still retains a bit of string articulation. Just a real nice blend of the silicon and Ge sounds.

I love this one. But again, it's not for everyone.

Also, I used the lovemyswitches April powder drop of Liquid Sunshine finish. Looks great. You can't see it from the pics but it does have some gold sparkles in there. Perfect for a yellow pedal.

Kudos to the forum for making this one happen.
 

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Last edited:
I built this after a failed first attempt and agree it's an all-time favorite. It straddles the Tonebender and Big Muff line extremely well. It also has good volume knob cleanup, which I didn't really expect. I love that the tone knob sweeps from TB to BMP sounds so easily. I used OC141 in Q3, pretty much 135 hfe and really low leakage. I found out the hard way though that your Ge diode has to be leaky if your transistor isn't! First time I actually had to test diodes to get a build to work correctly.
 
I built this after a failed first attempt and agree it's an all-time favorite. It straddles the Tonebender and Big Muff line extremely well. It also has good volume knob cleanup, which I didn't really expect. I love that the tone knob sweeps from TB to BMP sounds so easily. I used OC141 in Q3, pretty much 135 hfe and really low leakage. I found out the hard way though that your Ge diode has to be leaky if your transistor isn't! First time I actually had to test diodes to get a build to work correctly.
Good call out. This one can be finicky with Ge transistor and diode. I lucked out and found a great combo.
 
I ended up using an MP38A with an HFe of 55 and leakage at 85uA. Used 2n2222 and BC109C for the others. 1N70 diode but I have no idea on the leakage. Just kept swapping out diodes and Q3 until I found a combo I liked and the voltages looked good. Definitely one of my new favorites though.
 
If you have a box of MP38A transistors and some of them are really low gain, you could try using one of those in place of the Ge diode - theoretically, that would be the closest match.
 
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