1969 Fuzz Box

mictester · Post by **mictester** » 04 Aug 2011, 00:11

Way back - there was this....

: Horrid Fuzz; 1969Fuzz.png (11.27 KiB) Viewed 6606 times

If you build this, you might want to add 220pF across the 1M5 resistor at the base of the first transistor to keep your local AM station out!

Please feel free to change every value in the box - there are some great (and really nasty) sounds in there!

DrNomis · Post by **DrNomis** » 04 Aug 2011, 04:23

mictester wrote:Way back - there was this....

1969Fuzz.png
If you build this, you might want to add 220pF across the 1M5 resistor at the base of the first transistor to keep your local AM station out!

Please feel free to change every value in the box - there are some great (and really nasty) sounds in there!

Hmmmm...this is interesting, I used to have a CD of Iron Butterfly's InnaGaddaDaVida album, and have always wondered how the guitarist got that sound, have you tried building this circuit, and does it get that sound?....

phibes · Post by **phibes** » 04 Aug 2011, 04:43

DrNomis wrote:
mictester wrote:Way back - there was this....

1969Fuzz.png
If you build this, you might want to add 220pF across the 1M5 resistor at the base of the first transistor to keep your local AM station out!

Please feel free to change every value in the box - there are some great (and really nasty) sounds in there!

Hmmmm...this is interesting, I used to have a CD of Iron Butterfly's InnaGaddaDaVida album, and have always wondered how the guitarist got that sound, have you tried building this circuit, and does it get that sound?....

I'm gonna be that guy... who says... "You can only listen to InnaGaddaDaVida on vinyl!"

DrNomis · Post by **DrNomis** » 04 Aug 2011, 05:06

phibes wrote:
DrNomis wrote:
mictester wrote:Way back - there was this....

1969Fuzz.png
If you build this, you might want to add 220pF across the 1M5 resistor at the base of the first transistor to keep your local AM station out!

Please feel free to change every value in the box - there are some great (and really nasty) sounds in there!

Hmmmm...this is interesting, I used to have a CD of Iron Butterfly's InnaGaddaDaVida album, and have always wondered how the guitarist got that sound, have you tried building this circuit, and does it get that sound?....
I'm gonna be that guy... who says... "You can only listen to InnaGaddaDaVida on vinyl!"

Yeah, you're right, the only way to listen to those old classics is on their original media the way they were meant to be played and listened to, I love those old classics, I should hunt around in my CDs and stuff to see if I can find my CD of InnaGaddaDaVida, I figured out how to play the main guitar riff, pretty easy to play....

Listening to it right now on youtube, here's a link to it:

mictester · Post by **mictester** » 04 Aug 2011, 05:56

Of course I built it! Several times, because several other people wanted them! The earliest ones were built in to cylindrical steel cans, with the jack sockets, pots and footswitch (DPDT!) mounted in the lid, with the components wired point-to-point using offcuts of PCB material glued inside the lid as wiring "lands". One of these originals is still in use today!

Basically, it's a misbiased transistor driven by a stage with a bit of top lift (experiment with the emitter resistor bypass capacitor!). It can sound really amazing or really horrible!

DrNomis · Post by **DrNomis** » 04 Aug 2011, 08:33

mictester wrote:Of course I built it! Several times, because several other people wanted them! The earliest ones were built in to cylindrical steel cans, with the jack sockets, pots and footswitch (DPDT!) mounted in the lid, with the components wired point-to-point using offcuts of PCB material glued inside the lid as wiring "lands". One of these originals is still in use today!

Basically, it's a misbiased transistor driven by a stage with a bit of top lift (experiment with the emitter resistor bypass capacitor!). It can sound really amazing or really horrible!

Well, I'm going to have a go at building one of these because I've got an otherwise unused case that's already got most of what I need in it, it was originally for a Tonebender Proffessional Mk II, but I've decided to rebuild the Tonebender in a new case, and this circuit looks like just the thing to put in the old case, I've been wanting to build a Fuzz Pedal based on the mis-biased Transistor idea, I've got a book that has a similar circuit to this in it, which is what inspired me to try building this circuit in the first place....

I love these old Fuzz circuits....

bajaman · Post by **bajaman** » 04 Aug 2011, 10:41

great new project

thanks for posting this - i remember Iron Butterfly too - think i actually owned the album way back then

cheers
bajaman

DrNomis · Post by **DrNomis** » 04 Aug 2011, 13:11

bajaman wrote:great new project
thanks for posting this - i remember Iron Butterfly too - think i actually owned the album way back then
cheers
bajaman

It's one of those classic albums from the 60's Psychedelic era , isn't it Bajaman?, it got featured on one of the Nightmare On Elm Street movies, with old razorfingers,Freddy Krueger, himself....

Now I'm seriously going to have to look through my CDs to see if I can find it....

I wonder if anyone here remembers a band called the 13th Floor Elevators, with Roky Erickson?, and a song called "You're Gonna Miss Me".....

The interesting thing is, I was born on the 31St of August 1969, so, I've got some ties to the Psychedelic era in me, my mum used to be into alot of the music that was popular then, she probably still is.....

jrod · Post by **jrod** » 04 Aug 2011, 14:42

DrNomis wrote:I wonder if anyone here remembers a band called the 13th Floor Elevators, with Roky Erickson?, and a song called "You're Gonna Miss Me".....

Hell yeah! Been a Roky fan for many years. Got to shake his hand a couple of years ago.

DrNomis · Post by **DrNomis** » 04 Aug 2011, 14:49

jrod wrote:
DrNomis wrote:I wonder if anyone here remembers a band called the 13th Floor Elevators, with Roky Erickson?, and a song called "You're Gonna Miss Me".....
Hell yeah! Been a Roky fan for many years. Got to shake his hand a couple of years ago.

Wow!!!!, that's really cool.....

What was Roky like in person?....

jrod · Post by **jrod** » 04 Aug 2011, 19:05

DrNomis wrote:
jrod wrote:
DrNomis wrote:I wonder if anyone here remembers a band called the 13th Floor Elevators, with Roky Erickson?, and a song called "You're Gonna Miss Me".....
Hell yeah! Been a Roky fan for many years. Got to shake his hand a couple of years ago.

Wow!!!!, that's really cool.....

What was Roky like in person?....

He was super, super nice! I met him after a show in Dallas, TX, which was just fantastic!

DrNomis · Post by **DrNomis** » 05 Aug 2011, 04:38

jrod wrote:
DrNomis wrote:
jrod wrote:
DrNomis wrote:I wonder if anyone here remembers a band called the 13th Floor Elevators, with Roky Erickson?, and a song called "You're Gonna Miss Me".....
Hell yeah! Been a Roky fan for many years. Got to shake his hand a couple of years ago.

Wow!!!!, that's really cool.....

What was Roky like in person?....
He was super, super nice! I met him after a show in Dallas, TX, which was just fantastic!

Oh very cool, considering all the stuff he's been through, I did some online research into him after a classmate I met at uni suggested seeing if I could find out some info on him, I think it's a really heartwarming story of how Roky overcame all he went through and still be able to make music, I think it's a real testament to his character, America should regard him as a national treasure, right up there with Bob Dylan....

mictester · Post by **mictester** » 14 Oct 2011, 18:26

mictester wrote:Way back - there was this....

I've just found one of these in the box of miscellaneous PCBs! It's got a couple of changed values (probably made it sound less bad!) and a broken battery connector! I'll see if it still works when I find the pots for it (the originals have been "borrowed" for other things!

I'll put up a Vero layout for this museum piece. It actually is worth building!

Nocentelli · Post by **Nocentelli** » 14 Oct 2011, 20:09

I was bored.... unverified, but I'll breadboard it tonight and build the vero if I like it:

: 1969Fuzz - unverif.gif (15.62 KiB) Viewed 6258 times

mictester · Post by **mictester** » 14 Oct 2011, 20:39

Please add 220p (or 100p) from e1 to f1 to get rid of AM radio breakthrough!

GuitarlCarl · Post by **GuitarlCarl** » 14 Oct 2011, 21:37

Just a question... is that 1 meg pot, kind of an adjustable bootstrap?

mictester · Post by **mictester** » 15 Oct 2011, 01:42

GuitarlCarl wrote:Just a question... is that 1 meg pot, kind of an adjustable bootstrap?

No. It's just varying the bias voltage on the second transistor base. You can get some really bizarre sounds when the biasing takes the second stage close to Class C mode!

Nocentelli · Post by **Nocentelli** » 25 Oct 2011, 19:09

Finally got round to breadboarding this beast, and what a great circuit! Huge thanks to mictester for sharing.

Like many diy-ers, I'm constantly messing with different fuzz circuits because they're usually so simple, and even "bad" can often sound good - ideal for an inept tinkerer like me. For a long time, after trying out endless variations on the Si fuzzface, tonebender mkII, fuzzrite, bosstone, etc etc, I was pretty unsatisfied with Si fuzz circuits in general, with most sounding either too gated or gainy or trebly/harsh for my tastes. However, I tried out Skreddy's Lunar Module fuzz a while back (a fancy MKII variant with a variable high pass filter after Q1 and plenty of low-pass filtering throughout) and it hasn't left my pedalboard since! Great sound, really smooth and sophisticated, endless sustain, effortless feedback at will, and a quite respectable low-gain overdrive-ish sound with both gain controls rolled back.

Anyway, to cut a long (and boring) story short, I've recently found myself hankering after some of those gnarly/glitchy/gated retro fuzz sounds I thought I disliked, probably because the lunar module occasionally feels a little too smooth and polite - more like a distortion than a fuzz effect: Enter the 1969 Fuzz.

I didn't want to go over old ground, and the fuzz/bias control in the 1969 looked quite interesting. I first breadboarded the circuit as per mictester's schematic, albeit with 100n caps instead of 47n at the input and coupling Q1-2. It sounds great as it is, with the "fuzz" control moving from almost clean at minimum, through classic 60's buzzy-fuzz (very much Inna-Gadda-Da-Vida/Nuggets-era fuzzbox) at half way, and on into compressed and ultra-gated edgy fuzz at the maximum.

A couple of drawbacks prompted me to tinker further; Firstly, it is exceptionally loud so I changed the peculiar (to me) volume arrangement by removing the 22k resistor, the last 100n cap and the 390k resistor to ground: I put the 390k straight back in where the 22k had been (I didn't have anything else to hand) and put the 50k pot back in as a standard voltage divider volume control: This brought the volume down to a more manageable unity-at-12 o'clock level.

Next, I loved the range of sounds available from the existing fuzz control, but at higher settings the extreme gating can cut sustained notes off a little early, so to increase the available gain, I swapped the Q2 1k emitter resistor for a standard fuzzface/tonebender 1k gain control (I actually used a 1k2 fixed resistor to ground off the emitter with a 5k lin pot in parallel with a 22uF cap to ground, but this should work like a 1kB pot with a slightly different taper). With the gain pot at minimum, it operates exactly like the stock mictester circuit: Increasing the gain jacks up the sustain when the fuzz control is set high, and generally boosts the filth level at all settings.

A unintended consequence is that now, with the gain and fuzz set fairly high, sustained notes go on for ages, but the second you stop the note, the vicious gating cuts off potential squealing feedback: You can balance the fuzz and gain levels to set the precise sustain and gating required. With a compressor in front, notes go on indefinitely until you release the string - Silence!

Lastly, this extra gain (and possibly the new volume control) makes for a pretty bright sound, bordering on ice-pick at times: I opted for the fairly brutal but effective solution of a 3n3 cap to ground off volume lug 3. There are probably much more effective ways to achieve what I wanted to do, and as such any further suggestions will be gratefully received.

I shall tinker further this week, and post a vero layout when I'm done. Apologies for the super-long post, congratulations if you made it this far: Here's what I've got -

: 1969Fuzz_nocentelli edit.PNG (7.26 KiB) Viewed 6140 times

RnFR · Post by **RnFR** » 26 Oct 2011, 00:41

thanks for bringing this one back to my attention! sounds like i'll definitely have to give it a run through.

oh, and Simon, you just got 5,000 experience points for the Roky reference.

and anyone interested should check out the doc on him. it's a tough to watch, heartbreaking story, but definitely a great film.

Nocentelli · Post by **Nocentelli** » 28 Oct 2011, 11:40

Verified - Works nicely:

: 1969Fuzz - edit_nocentelli_vero3.gif (16.05 KiB) Viewed 6072 times

1969 Fuzz Box [documentation]