The Pinche Cabron - an AS3046D Superfuzz

jubal81

Well-known member
I went over to Smallbear's site and noticed a new IC he's stocking on the front page. It's the AS3046D, which is 5 BJT, NPN transistors, with two of them a matched, differential pair. Since reading Chuck's transistor matching thread the other day, I've had the Superfuzz on the brain, since I've always been curious and have never built one.

So when I saw that chip, my brain:

take-that-as3046d-add-some-passives-and-baby-you-got-a-stew-going-2.jpg


So, I've whipped up this so far:

Pinche-Cabron-sch.png

Pinche-Cabron.png
 
I'm interested in the classic version, but just to spitball:
I could use one of the NPNs on the chip as a bootstrapped 'cornish' input buffer. Replace the phase splitter with a dual opamp. Add another dual opamp after the Ge diode clippers for a proper tone stack and makeup gain.
 
Pretty clever stuff you're cooking up there....! Whoop whoop. Interested to see and hear how this pans out.
 
If you've got opamps, why go to the trouble of building a Cornish buffer?

Have you played a pedal that uses a differential pair for octave generation? I played around a bit with that configuration when I was building & modding the Apple Fritter. You can bias it so both transistors are off or both are on a little bit. Either way, there is a dead-band where no signal gets thru. Alternatively, you can deliberately unbalance the biasing so that as the signal decays, the octave drops out. In all cases, you get a gating effect, so make sure you like that part of it before spending too much time developing a circuit around that particular functional block. I prefer the diode octave-up, like the Squidward, Foxx Tone Machine, etc., but that's just my personal preference.
 
If you've got opamps, why go to the trouble of building a Cornish buffer?

Have you played a pedal that uses a differential pair for octave generation? I played around a bit with that configuration when I was building & modding the Apple Fritter. You can bias it so both transistors are off or both are on a little bit. Either way, there is a dead-band where no signal gets thru. Alternatively, you can deliberately unbalance the biasing so that as the signal decays, the octave drops out. In all cases, you get a gating effect, so make sure you like that part of it before spending too much time developing a circuit around that particular functional block. I prefer the diode octave-up, like the Squidward, Foxx Tone Machine, etc., but that's just my personal preference.
A year or two ago, I had a Muff type thing on the breadboard with that diode octave up on a sidechain and blended back in with a mixer at the output. If I remember, it actually worked pretty well.
 
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