Another day, another muffin

cdwillis

Well-known member
I've been tweaking big muff circuits on the breadboard for a while now and built a bunch of different versions. This is sort of a blend between a triangle and a ram's head you could say. Most of the muffs I've liked have used 47nf caps on the clipping diodes, so I wanted to experiment with using 1uf caps there and making it sound good. Kit Rae's site says increasing the cap size there will fatten up distortion/fuzz, but I've found it is mostly the opposite. Typically a 47nf sounds fatter than a 100nf, which sounds fatter than 1uf on the clipping diodes. Lower gain on q2/q3 seems thicken it up also. Anyway, It's fun seeing how different tweaks in the circuit alter the sound. This is one of those circuits that I never get tired of playing with.

As far as this muff, counterclockwise on the tone knob puts you into stoner doom territory and clockwise takes you to a chainsaw distortion that gives me Smashing Pumpkins vibes. It has a pretty wide gain range from almost overdrive to your typical muff sustaining fuzzstortion. Not quite as gainy and compressed at max as the other higher gain Rams Heads I've built, but at the same time I don't find it lacking. Altering Q4's emitter from the typical 2.7k to 2.2k increased the output a little bit as well, which is always a nice bonus with a big muff. I used bc549c transistors with this one, but socketed it to try other ones as well. I used carbon film resistors and all ceramic caps aside from the power filtering electrolytic cap. Mostly because it looks cool and I wanted to see if I noticed it being noisier than my metal film and film caps builds. Maybe a little? It's hard to tell. This is one of the cooler ones I've built so far. I think I still favor the versions with the 47nf clipping caps, mostly the more aggressive triangle style ones.

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