I got Muffins on the Protoboard!

Song Naga

Song Naga

Member
Hi all, I kludged together one of the PedalPCB Protoboards a couple weeks ago and figured I'd put it through its paces after building my first Muffin Fuzz pedal about the same time and finding that there are all sorts of versions of the build in the BOM. I opted to build a Green Russian for the PCB I ordered, so I tossed a Civil War version on the proto board.

I'm not very practiced at breadboarding, and had to pull the circuit apart and move the transistors to different areas to isolate each section a bit and make things easier to troubleshoot. I wound up getting a 'mighty fine' sound up to the tone controls, and had to pull the ass end of the circuit apart a couple of times before I finally got things in the right place, but when I had it I knew that I had it! My last problem was I had a 100n cap in the tone circuit's LPF rather than the called-for 10n cap, which was producing a muddy and low volume result at the pedal's output.

I know I'll probably inevitably build most or all of the versions into 125B pedals now that I know that I can, but in the Meantime (Helmet reference) I think I'm going to build each version on the proto board to break it in and get some practice. Maybe by then I'll know a thing or two and will start tweaking things to craft some sort of custom muff! I'm also enjoying other Muffin-related posts and related rabbit holes (https://www.kitrae.net/music/music_big_muff.html).

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Haha, I'm literally doing the same thing at the moment


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This is the green russian, Its working but I need to troubleshoot very low volume - My plan is to build this, get it working, then build the civil war, a/b them, and then build the next one and a/b them til i choose my favorite. I've made mine very bunched up which I've already realised is quite dumb.
 
Sweet! I found that spacing out the transistors helped me understand and troubleshoot the circuit hugely. Each one has 4 - 8 additonal components to support it, so there's plenty of room to add those around the transistors and then jumper between each 'stage' of the circuit. This approach helped me identify my low volume at output problem, which was due to a wrong value capacitor in the filter. If your signal sounds great going into the filter but crummy coming out of it, maybe you've done the same?
 
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