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Another Tone Bender that is more of a Big Muff. Take the first two stages of a Colorsound Supa Tone Bender, add a third stage that is part Big Muff and part Tone Bender Mk. III (with a Zener diode rather than the customary 10k/10k voltage divider), stick a weird variant of a Big Muff Tone Stack...

Despite the Tone Bender name, it's definitely a Big Muff. It's similar to some of the Ram's Head-era Big Muffs, but with a few differences. First and foremost, Q2 has no clipping diodes, which increases the output volume significantly and results in what sounds like heavily asymmetrical...

Here's my take on the Monolith Oracle. The original is described as being a modified Tone Bender Mk. I.5, although it's biased like a Fuzz Face. Either way, it's the familiar feedback amplifier topology followed by a Big Muff-style tone control. The schematic is at the bottom of the post. The...

Picking a favorite fuzz pedal is like picking your favorite offspring. With that said, the Rotobone is a strong candidate for my favorite fuzz. Enough has been written elsewhere about its trumpet-like tones, the glassy cleans when you roll back the volume knob, and its wide range of more...

This one is about as straightforward as they get. What is it? As the enclosure subtly hints, it's not actually a Tube Screamer. Rather, it's a Rat. I used a Motorola LM308HZ for the op amp and a TO-18 metal can 2N4393 for the JFET. The enclosure is a matte black sand 125B from Tayda, UV printed...

After tracing the Latent Lemon Hurts, an interesting contemporary take on the venerable Interfax Harmonic Percolator, I laid out a couple of PCBs for a similar Harmonic Percolator build. I couldn't make up my mind as to whether I wanted to build a 1590BB2 pedal like the Hurts or whether I wanted...

Not my most recent build (I built it last January, so it's one of my older builds), but a very enjoyable one. For those not in the know, the Buzzaround (PedalPCB Gnat) is a wonderfully nasty germanium fuzz. Garage rock? Psychedelia? Death metal? Sure, the Buzzaround can handle all of those and...

As @Aleph Null (and many others among us) can attest, spelling errors can have shockingly long lives. But when it comes to pedals, few have had a longer life when some anonymous employee of Hoshino Gakki decided to name the company's new Big Muff clone "Super Fuzz Sustainar." It's about 53 years...

It's a really cool take on the Harmonic Percolator. I traced it from some photos, which isn't generally the best practice, but what I have on the breadboard sounds right on to my ears. Anyway, it's a simple but fun dirt circuit. Here's the schematic: Some notes: For Q1, any low leakage...

For everybody's reference, here's a spreadsheet with the measurements I've made of the germanium transistors in my stash. All measurements were taken using a Peak Atlas DCA55 at approximately 70ºF/21ºC...

Continuing my Big Muff building bonanza, here's my take on the Emanating Fist Electronics XB-70. The XB-70 is essentially the same circuit as this 1976 V3 Big Muff that Kit Rae traced, but with a R11 in the below schematic changed to 10k: It was a nice, straightforward build with no...

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...

The Ibanez Standard Fuzz is an interesting variation on the Univox Super Fuzz. The two circuits are largely identical, with the following changes: The Super Fuzz's complex two transistor input stage is replaced with a simple JFET amplifier; The phase splitter transistor is biased using a...

In the latest installment of my Big Muff binge, I built a Violet Ram's Head. Takeaway here is that you should build one, too, if you haven't already. Build it right and you get a smooth and articulate muff that sounds good all the way through the tone control's rotation. I'm generally a...

Put this together last weekend. I used the @cdwillis schematic from this post as my guide. The Dope Priest is a great sounding Big Muff variant made by D*A*M's Emanating Fist Electronics brand with some interesting component value choices—470Ω emitter resistor on Q1, 150Ω emitter resistors on Q2...

Bottom line up front—this thing is seriously awesome. For those not in the know, it's a modified fuzz face that uses an op amp servo circuit to keep the bias stabilized at a wide range of temperatures. So having said the most important part, on to the build. I went slightly premium on this...

Here's my take on the Univox Super Fuzz. I was going for something a bit different and more flexible than the original, so I borrowed some features from the now discontinued Wattson Classic Electronics EFY-6. The main changes are adding an octave control that goes from no octave up to full...

This is a pretty straightforward and fun build. The Terminal Fuzz is an improved clone of the Shin-Ei Companion Fuzz. The Terminal cicuit incorporates the output boost stage from the General Guitar Gadgets Companion Fuzz and adds two additional controls: a 250k pot wired as a variable resistor...

A few months back my name came up in the Mystery PIF thread, and @tcpoint generously sent me this PCB and a matched set of MMBF5457 JFETs. I finally got around to building it over the weekend. It's a fun build and I highly recommend it! This was the first build where I soldered SMD transistors...

After building a Dizzy Tone and a Buzzaround, I set my eyes on their close cousin, the Tone Bender Mk. III. Like most early fuzz pedals, the component values of the Tone Bender Mk. III and its variants changed frequently during their relatively short production period. Some values remained...