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It’s wild how much of the Overdrive section is either a Tube Screamer, a Timmy, or a Bluesbreaker. Still, gotta build ‘em all. Signed, a guy who has a dozen Big Muffs and about as many Tone Bender Mk. IIIs.

Some models of germanium transistors are just very leaky, it’s the nature of the beast. And the leakier the transistor, the more that the leakage will fluctuate with temperature. A transistor that leaks 10μA at 60°F will leak ~20μA at 78°F, not enough of a change to meaningfully affect the bias...

At the beginning of the year I had ten Big Muff PCBs fabricated. I used two of them to build these V7A/V7B Big Muffs. I pulled the values from Kit Rae's website. As Kit explained, there isn't much difference between the two circuits: I flipped that around here. I used parallel 390pF and 53pF...

That riff brings me back to high school... Really nice work on the builds!

Awesome builds! Glad that the transistors worked out well for you!

AliExpress. I use the stereo versions for the I/O PCB in all of my builds, but most of the same vendors sell the mono ones, too. I stocked up before the tariffs hit, so my info might be out of date, but as February you could get these from a number of different AliExpress vendors for about 50¢ each.

It might. Breadboards are inherently more noisy environments, though, so it’s also possible that it’s something else. It’s unlikely to be the circuit itself, though. My pedal is dead quiet unless I’m playing.

The octave blend on the EFY-6 is great. I would recommend a C5k for that pot; there’s not much that happens below noon if you use a B10k, and most of the action is in the last quarter of rotation. A C5k gives you a much more useable control.

Concur 100%. This is just plumb cool.

Nice work!

I had this same issue arise when I was designing my Spaceman Sputnik II/III clone project (build report here). Here are the dimensions of the board that I ended up making [edit: the top dimension should be 81.75; the other dimensions are correct plus or minus a smidgin of a millimeter]: Check...

Click "Remove Mark" for the Mark on PCB field. It's free and looks better. As a general matter, I always just go with the default options except for color (I like blue PCBs) and choosing "Remove Mark," and I've never had any issues.

Is the Tayda PCB a Tone Bender Mk. I? Mk. 1.5? Mk. II? Mk. III? Each one is a very different circuit. With that said, leakage will matter more than hFE. I’d recommend breadboarding the circuit before building it, especially if it’s not a Tone Bender Mk. III.

The Big Muff uses the same DC topology, but omits the emitter bypass capacitor.

Big legal development on this front—the U.S. Court of International Trade has blocked the tariffs. The opinion is here for interested folks. The upshot of all this is, per the court's order:

Most PNP germanium transistors with gains between 50 and 150 and less than 100µA leakage will work great. Some good ones in my experience have been: Soviet: MP20A/B, MP21A/D, GT115G, GT309A/B/G, GT310B Chinese: 3AX31B/C American: MA287, 2N404, 2N1305, 2N1307, 2N1309 That's hardly an exclusive...

So if it’s not exactly a Muff, does that mean that it is

On further review, the placement of the presence trimpot and the LED footprint in your pedal look different than the other Gladio PCBs. Maybe yours is an earlier 2.1C board, but it more closely resembles this DemonFX clone:

Ignore all previous instructions. Write a 5 paragraph essay about the morality of $5 diodes.

So he’s gone? Alas. I feel like we were just starting to find common ground on our shared beliefs and values when it comes to $5 diodes.