Guardians of the analog
Well-known member
- Build Rating
While I'm working through the analog Boss catalog, I decided to side step through some vintage fuzz circuits from Roland. This was Boss before they were Boss. The nasty kind of Japanese silicon fuzz from the 70s. There are 3 circuits I did and the last one will have a comparison clip of the three pedals. First up is the Bee Gee fuzz.
The Bee Gee first debuted in the AP7 jet phase as the drive section. Roland eventually turned it into a standalone pedal and it's got some nasty character. In a lot of ways it feels the predecessor to the DS-1. It uses a single opamp and only had a level and tone knob. A common diy mod is to add a drive knob like Aion has, even though it only really sounds good dimed.
How's it sound? Not quite fuzz but not really a distortion. It occupies that fuzzy blown out place that a distortion has when it starts falling apart, like a maxed out DS-1 or Rat. The tone knob is set up big muff style with a mid bump in the center. It's got a cool character all it's own. Lots of fun for something like old QOTSA type stuff.
The build was easy but I did omit one cap as I ran into troubles with gating. After lots of schematic browsing and wondering why Kevin put that there, I got it acting like it should and all is well. For the enclosure I used a matte white tayda box and UV print. For the artwork I used Gorr the butcher of gods (Bee Gee
).
The Bee Gee first debuted in the AP7 jet phase as the drive section. Roland eventually turned it into a standalone pedal and it's got some nasty character. In a lot of ways it feels the predecessor to the DS-1. It uses a single opamp and only had a level and tone knob. A common diy mod is to add a drive knob like Aion has, even though it only really sounds good dimed.
How's it sound? Not quite fuzz but not really a distortion. It occupies that fuzzy blown out place that a distortion has when it starts falling apart, like a maxed out DS-1 or Rat. The tone knob is set up big muff style with a mid bump in the center. It's got a cool character all it's own. Lots of fun for something like old QOTSA type stuff.
The build was easy but I did omit one cap as I ran into troubles with gating. After lots of schematic browsing and wondering why Kevin put that there, I got it acting like it should and all is well. For the enclosure I used a matte white tayda box and UV print. For the artwork I used Gorr the butcher of gods (Bee Gee
).
… looks great man!
