MichaelW
Well-known member
As part of my continuing education in "fuzzology" I built a Twin Face which sounded like a cool project.
Many thanks to @szukalski for helping me sort through my meager stash of transistors to choose the right ones!
There are no curses in Orc-ish, Ent-ish, or Elvish to describe how much I detest using single pin sockets for transistors.
But I did not have enough of the T-05 style sockets and they seem to be out of stock everywhere.
I think broke a socket maybe 3 times trying to insert and audition transistors what a pain in the butt!
I wound up using MP16B's with Hfe of 52 in Q1 and 63 in Q2. This was not what I set out to do. I have some GT404's and GT408's that are in the more appropriate HFe range but they were giving me fits with getting them to work. They would intermittently work and then cut out. I thought it was the sockets causing the problem so I spent quite a bit of time screwing around with those but turns out that these are just super finicky transistors. The Ge side actually sounds really good to me with the lower gain MP16B's. Kinda snarly, rude and spitty. Made me want to play the riff with 21st Century Schizoid Man as soon as I dialed it in.
On the Si side I used 2N2222A and a 2N2222 HFE of 287-285 respectively. It's definitely the more "polite" side of the pedal but still rocks pretty hard.
Biased by ear.
I knew this was going to be a tricky build to fit into a 1590B with all the tall caps so I had to get a bit creative.
I wound up mounting a couple of the caps on bottom side to get them out of the way. Then tilted the board from front to back to lower the remaining caps so the back would fit.
