andare
Well-known member
I thought I was a lot of things.
I thought I was a Fuzz Face guy. I can get clean, dirty, overdrive and fuzz from one pedal with a twist of the Volume knob on my Strat and it looks like a landmine. Good, now I can play!
But I couldn't leave it alone. No, I had to go and follow a breadboard tutorial and fire up my precarious concoction and decide to build it on tagboard because it looked so groovy (also I hate cutting traces and soldering on stripboard).
Behold the Spaghetti Western Monster:
This is the diagram I used, courtesy of good people on the internet:
In the end I left the pulldown resistor and 1N4001 diode out. I should have just put a 1N5817 in series with 9V in lieu of that red jumper. I'll do it next time.
The transistors both measure 236 hFE on my TC1 tester, which I think is too much. This is a noisy pedal. I highly recommend putting the 22k resistor on a switch. You need it in for the classic sound but switching it out will give you a bass and volume boost for more normal tones. Yes, I tried it on bass and it's not good. With those tiny 47n / 2n2 caps it's hardly surprising.
This was my first time working with tagboard. It does look groovy but you have to use regular components because of the spacing. No mojo parts like carbon comps and axial caps.
What I like: each tag has 3 holes so it's easy to connect components without having to cram their leads into one lug. The middle hole is especially handy for jumpers, like those for 9V and ground and the one connecting the Q1c to Q2b. I ran those under the board.
What I don't like: inserting components in the inner lugs is fiddly and the thin leads of modern, low-tolerance components (booooring!) make it hard to obtain a clean look.
The board is "secured" with foam tape. Standoffs would be better but I don't have any.
How's it sound? Like it should. It goes well above unity. If I play it into a clean amp the volume goes up as I crank the Depth knob. This is a vintage fuzz circuit, you have to play it into a tube amp that is breaking up. It's much more even then. The volume drops in the middle setting when both transistors are mixed in equal parts. It's not a good sound IMO. I can't find any octave fuzz tones in there. I read you need lower-gain transistors for that.
A 2n2 cap from input to ground eliminates the radio when the guitar's volume is at 0 but it does nothing for the incredibly high noise floor. A 100n cap cures that but it kills the character of the pedal and smoothes out the clean up tones into a mushy mess.
What's next? Breadboarding another Fuzzrite and exploring mods: bigger caps for more bass and various caps and resistor additions to tame the excessive gain and noise. Once that's accomplished I'm going to build it on a small 2x6 turret board. Now THAT is groovy and my mojo components will fit.
I thought I was a Fuzz Face guy. I can get clean, dirty, overdrive and fuzz from one pedal with a twist of the Volume knob on my Strat and it looks like a landmine. Good, now I can play!
But I couldn't leave it alone. No, I had to go and follow a breadboard tutorial and fire up my precarious concoction and decide to build it on tagboard because it looked so groovy (also I hate cutting traces and soldering on stripboard).
Behold the Spaghetti Western Monster:
This is the diagram I used, courtesy of good people on the internet:
In the end I left the pulldown resistor and 1N4001 diode out. I should have just put a 1N5817 in series with 9V in lieu of that red jumper. I'll do it next time.
The transistors both measure 236 hFE on my TC1 tester, which I think is too much. This is a noisy pedal. I highly recommend putting the 22k resistor on a switch. You need it in for the classic sound but switching it out will give you a bass and volume boost for more normal tones. Yes, I tried it on bass and it's not good. With those tiny 47n / 2n2 caps it's hardly surprising.
This was my first time working with tagboard. It does look groovy but you have to use regular components because of the spacing. No mojo parts like carbon comps and axial caps.
What I like: each tag has 3 holes so it's easy to connect components without having to cram their leads into one lug. The middle hole is especially handy for jumpers, like those for 9V and ground and the one connecting the Q1c to Q2b. I ran those under the board.
What I don't like: inserting components in the inner lugs is fiddly and the thin leads of modern, low-tolerance components (booooring!) make it hard to obtain a clean look.
The board is "secured" with foam tape. Standoffs would be better but I don't have any.
How's it sound? Like it should. It goes well above unity. If I play it into a clean amp the volume goes up as I crank the Depth knob. This is a vintage fuzz circuit, you have to play it into a tube amp that is breaking up. It's much more even then. The volume drops in the middle setting when both transistors are mixed in equal parts. It's not a good sound IMO. I can't find any octave fuzz tones in there. I read you need lower-gain transistors for that.
A 2n2 cap from input to ground eliminates the radio when the guitar's volume is at 0 but it does nothing for the incredibly high noise floor. A 100n cap cures that but it kills the character of the pedal and smoothes out the clean up tones into a mushy mess.
What's next? Breadboarding another Fuzzrite and exploring mods: bigger caps for more bass and various caps and resistor additions to tame the excessive gain and noise. Once that's accomplished I'm going to build it on a small 2x6 turret board. Now THAT is groovy and my mojo components will fit.
