Buddy's Breadboard and Circuit Design Notes

A day or two ago I began the journey of how to put my Heavy Devi schematic onto vero and I used DIY layout creator. It's free (me likey :cool: ) and pretty user friendly. If your just starting out on this program, I would suggest drawing a very simple layout such as a LPB-1 or a BMP tone control just so you can understand how the program works, although it is pretty intuitive. I remember attempting the program almost a year ago (it's in a thread here somewhere) and had similar results. It took me probably a good hour to draw this out from the schematic. Some advice: check and recheck your work here tracing the circuit, both AC and DC paths. Do the work here so your soldering time becomes fun. The layout had to get tweaked slightly after my first go around thanks to our local circuit wizard Mr @Chuck D. Bones and his guidance.

Behold! The Heavy Devi! This is a gnarly little fuzz circuit inspired by Devi Ever's common circuit blocks. There are 4 controls: VOLUME, FUZZ, BASS, and TREBLE. BASS and TREBLE cut out the corresponding frequencies. This circuit is relatively bass heavy, but not as muddy as you may think. VOLUME is pretty self explanatory and doesn't really affect much else in the circuit.

The FUZZ control is where the fun is at. CCW and you're in distortion sounding territory. I say that because of the treble attack that comes through reminds me of a decent distortion pedal without the ice pick highs but still relatively tight sounding. You can dial back your guitar's volume a lot and get a very "pinched" sounding fuzz too. As you start to crank it more and more gnarly fuzz comes through known in many of Devi's circuits (think Hyperion here). When maxed out there's some noise that comes through, but that's ok considering the overall tone.

To be perfectly honest with you guys, this is a big milestone for me. If you've been with me since the beginning of this thread then you know my "goal" was to design my own circuit start to finish. Is this circuit 100% original? Hell no since it's merely putting existing building blocks together in a way that I like. Can I call this circuit my own? Absolutely! There is no other circuit out there that I know of on the interwebs that contains this particular layout and component values. Although this is a pretty simple circuit, I had tons of fun doing this little experiment that I quickly fell in love with.

I'm posting my experience here to hopefully inspire others to do the same. Experiment; try something new; do a little reading on how/why a circuit block works the way it does and then try it and see to reinforce the learning.

Oh, yea. This layout is verified ;). With 4 pots, this won't fit in a 1590A. 1590b probably and definitely in a 125b given the size of the board, though you'll have a lot of empty real estate inside. The pots are wired here as if the knobs are facing up. These layouts can get confusing sometimes. The power filtering cap was a bit of an afterthought since the protoboard already does that and apologies for the diagonal placement here. Can't you tell I'm excited about this? I hope some of you try this circuit out.

-BuddytheReow

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You know I’m building this :) Thank you!

It may be good practice to include the power section in the schematic, for newer builders of these wonderful things!
 
I did 2 quick writeups on a blended fuzz and an input section. Why not combine both in one circuit?

This is my latest little ditty I came up with. The FAT control alters the amount of bass into the circuit. C3 gets rid of RF and some of the highs. The BLEND control is unique here in that when set at about noon you get some weird harmonics coming through. I had to tame the 2nd stage volume which is why I put R4 in there. Switchable hard clipping diodes afterwards cuz, why not? Simple volume control afterwards.

I call this circuit the 2 End Blend. Let me know what you think on your breadboards.

BuddytheReow

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Chuck D. Bones said:
Kinda resembles a Fuzzrite. Since you're blending out-of-phase signals, you should get some octave-up tones.
Click to expand...
Yea. It has a similar topology with some extra goodies thrown in there. I'm sure with your knowledge you can make this better. It was a fun build regardless.

@Chuck D. Bones how can you tell just by looking at the schematic that the signals would be out of phase? What's the giveaway here?
 
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BuddytheReow said:
Yea. It has a similar topology with some extra goodies thrown in there. I'm sure with your knowledge you can make this better. It was a fun build regardless.

@Chuck D. Bones how can you tell just by looking at the schematic that the signals would be out of phase? What's the giveaway here?
Click to expand...

For my own edification I will try to reason this out. The first transistor flips the phase, then you split the signal into A & B.
A goes through another transistor flipping the phase of A again, so it's in phase with the original dry signal, but B is still flipped out of phase.

Add a transistor buffer/boost to B that flips B's phase before you mix A and B back together and you should be okay.
 
Feral Feline said:
For my own edification I will try to reason this out. The first transistor flips the phase, then you split the signal into A & B.
A goes through another transistor flipping the phase of A again, so it's in phase with the original dry signal, but B is still flipped out of phase.

Add a transistor buffer/boost to B that flips B's phase before you mix A and B back together and you should be okay.
Click to expand...
That makes sense to me
 
I attempted to make a vero layout of the 2 End Blend Fuzz. I haven't gotten around to soldering it, so this layout is right now not verified but it looks ok to me. If this doesn't work let me know. Work has been crap this week so I don't have the time to test it right now. Sorry for the diagonal layout of that ONE resistor but it made the board a bit smaller. I'm still practicing my layout abilities here. It's like a puzzle.

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I whipped up the 2 End Blend Fuzz over the weekend and there was a small change to the layout. This one is verified :cool: .

Will this get boxed up? I'm not sure yet. I've got other projects I'm working on. Alter the clipping diodes to your taste (D2, D3).
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More a PSA than anything else to the aspiring breadboard baker, jumper wires make a huge difference. The problem is that a lot of the more flexible wires are either way too long or way too short and can make your layouts quite messy. So, naturally, I started making my own jumpers out of some hookup wire in various sizes and color coordinated. This turned out to be a very tedious and time consuming process and I think I made 1-2 dozen in about an hour by more or less eyeballing the different sizes I needed. A few days ago I bit the bullet and dropped $12 for some hookup wire based jumpers and these are a godsend! Sometimes I'm waaaay too cheap in this hobby thinking I can just DIY everything. $12 saves me hours of tedious work with no circuit built as a result. The small ones in the bottom right corner will be used all the time based on how I layout my boards. The large ones I'm probably not going to use, but you never know.

I still need to pull the trigger on some breadboard mountable switches which will clean up the layouts even more.


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Using my new jumper wires I decided to go back to basics a little bit and use the good ol’ Bazz Fuss as the dirt portion. For anyone interested in breadboarding, get yourself a pack of these jumpers and some tweezers. This is a blended input cap into a Muff style input stage into a homemade darlington Bazz Fuss with a bias control (1n4148 diode for now but may make that switchable) into a baxandall tone stack taken directly from the Acid Rain Fuzz followed by a volume control . The input muff stage has a very large resistor (220k I think) going to ground at the output and acts as a “starve” control.

5 knobs, 4 BC549Cs, and a diode. I call this one the Thunder Fuss. Schematic and attempted vero layout will follow for those that are interested.
 

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BuddytheReow said:
More a PSA than anything else to the aspiring breadboard baker, jumper wires make a huge difference. The problem is that a lot of the more flexible wires are either way too long or way too short and can make your layouts quite messy. So, naturally, I started making my own jumpers out of some hookup wire in various sizes and color coordinated. This turned out to be a very tedious and time consuming process and I think I made 1-2 dozen in about an hour by more or less eyeballing the different sizes I needed. A few days ago I bit the bullet and dropped $12 for some hookup wire based jumpers and these are a godsend! Sometimes I'm waaaay too cheap in this hobby thinking I can just DIY everything. $12 saves me hours of tedious work with no circuit built as a result. The small ones in the bottom right corner will be used all the time based on how I layout my boards. The large ones I'm probably not going to use, but you never know.

I still need to pull the trigger on some breadboard mountable switches which will clean up the layouts even more.


View attachment 29517
Click to expand...
I have that exact wire kit. I was breadboarding an expanded version of my Dumesday Fuzz yesterday trying to figure out a way to turn a no-knob fuzz into a four knob fuzz (I mean, adding knobs is easy— figuring out what kind of controls is the tricky part. Volume? Duh. Fuzz? Idk… it’s got great cleanup with the guitar vol, and doesn’t sound as good just lowering the gain the usual way. Voltage starve? Probably. Tone? But what kind of tone stack— can’t decide. Some sort of envelope controlled q2 bias? Maybe, but maybe too weird) and those jumper wires came in handy as usual
 
I just found my little box of breadboard jumpers the other day, they'd gone missing after skipping across the Great Pond. I've been using regular those shreddable ribbon cables with the pins already attached (male-male & male-female ends), hookup wire and snipped capacitor leads — whatever I could get my hands on, in most cases either too long, too flimsy or...

So glad to have found the box of jumpers, now if I could just find the other assorted jumpers I'd collected beyond what came in the box.

That sums up breadboarding pretty well, ie thinking outside the box. Yes, I'm pretty good at stating the obvious.
 
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