Another BMP Variant? Cloning Frantone's The Sweet

Fingolfen

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It's been a while since I've done a Big Muff Clone (in my world two months is an eternity!), and I figured it was time I finished up a project that's been collecting dust - Frantone's The Sweet. Frantone is an independent pedal builder who does a lot of very cool fuzz effects (though there are others thrown in there). I was intrigued by her big muff variant as it includes a couple of germanium transistors and I honestly wanted to see what it would do. Unfortunately there isn't a commercial PCB available, but since when has that stopped me?

EL - Frantone the Sweet - 01.jpg

Fortunately Effects Layouts has traced the circuit and has an etchable PCB. I did have a little trouble on the etches - likely because I was using two light sources and had some parallax error - nothing a little work with the engraver couldn't fix! The layout is both typical and atypical as big muff circuits go - there are the four transistor gain stages, but two of them are NTE103A germanium transistors. One is a conventional MPSA18, but the oddball is Q4 which is listed as FS25444. As far as I've been able to determine, there is no such animal - anywhere. The only mention of an FS25444 transistor is in relation to "The Sweet" as far as I've been able to find online, so I'm guessing that this is a rebrand of some sort. The Effects Layout instructions indicate the usual suspects will work (2N5088, MPSA18, BC549C, etc), so I ended up going that route. I really wish I knew what that transistor actually was so I could breadboard it, or at least find out what the gain of the transistor actually was.

EL - Frantone the Sweet - 02.jpg

The rest of the assembly was really fairly straightforward. The layout was very clean with all of the components in parallel rows. That made it very easy to keep track of everything as I was populating the drilled, etched PCB. The layout uses a lot (I mean a lot!) of 1uF electrolytic capacitors. Again, at some point I may breadboard this and see what difference (if any) film capacitors would make in the tone.

The rest of the wiring is typical for my EL builds. I use a star ground like I'd use on an AionFX board, and all of the jack connections are wrapped in heat-shrink tubing. I'm using a PedalPCB 3PDT daughter board (I'm going through these like water because they're probably the best I've used) to hook up the stomp switch, and the LED is completely wired off board.

EL - Frantone the Sweet - 03.jpg

The enclosure still needs the metal "Steggo" logo attached to the front, but I went ahead and got a photo of it. This one is a fairly simple enclosure featuring a happy Suchomimus. The name is a bit of a stretch - "The Sweet" reminds me of sugar, table sugar is sucrose, and "Suchomimus" was the closest dinosaur name I could find to sucrose, but he looks cool. The rest of the enclosure is just white on black as the original pedal is a mix of white and green text on black.

The tone of this pedal is, well, very different from what I'd initially expected reading the descriptions. Frantone describes The Sweet as:
"Over the top in every way using the classic tone of germanium transistors. This is the longest sustaining and smoothest sounding all-transistor fuzztone you will ever own. I have designed many fuzztones, including the 2000 New York City Big Muff for Electro-Harmonix, so believe me when I say that this is the most extreme one I have ever made. It's tone is indescribable. The full bottom and crisp highs will astound you, and the endless sustain will make you cry like a baby. But don't take my word for it.. try one for yourself!"
Before I got the pedal together, I'd hit some demos online, and from what I've seen, it's really more of a "doom fuzz" than a pedal with "crisp highs." Once I got my version together, it sounded very much like what I'd seen online - a doom fuzz with a fairly high noise floor. However, the volume will go so far above unity, the noise floor issues can be mitigated fairly well with the volume knob. As a "doom fuzz" it sounds great, but it will probably limit the overall utility of the pedal for me. I do want to experiment with it some more, and maybe find the real thing somewhere to compare it to.

Original blog entry: https://steggostudios.blogspot.com/2023/01/another-bmp-variant-cloning-frantones.html
 
This looks awesome! I love the Frantone stuff. I wish there were more projects out there. I just got the PedalPCB board for the Peach Fuzz and I'm excited to try it out.
I have that one as well, I just haven't gotten to it yet. Let me know how yours turns out.
 
Peach fuzz rules. I did the bassweet that effects layouts sells and it is intense by itself. Says bye bye pretty quick in a live mix though. Haven't recorded with it but I think that'll be where it gets used the most going forward. .
 
This looks awesome! I love the Frantone stuff. I wish there were more projects out there. I just got the PedalPCB board for the Peach Fuzz and I'm excited to try it out.
She’s cool. I just populated the Cream Puff board. I’m going to do up a cool pink enclosure for it.
 
This is awesome! Wanted to add, I haven't built the Sweet, but I was intrigued about those 1n6263 diodes. I grabbed some as part of a Mouser order and tried them in the symmetrical (non-stock) diode position on a Percolator build. They completely slay in that circuit!
 
This is awesome! Wanted to add, I haven't built the Sweet, but I was intrigued about those 1n6263 diodes. I grabbed some as part of a Mouser order and tried them in the symmetrical (non-stock) diode position on a Percolator build. They completely slay in that circuit!
That's a great idea! I picked up a few, I should breadboard them with a few other circuits and see what they can do.
 
I've built one or two of her pedals on Vero - always good results.

I was wondering about a sweet dinosaur name and my first thought was candisaur, as in candy lizard. So I googled it and found that Kandisaur is an area in India!

But there is a Suchosaurus - crocodile-lizard - which I think wouldn't mind being called a Suchrosaurus. What's he gonna do? Bite you?
 
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