MAN what a suck load of suck. weak, anemic, muddy, crummy... no love at all. first one i'd built, really unimpressed. used a nice vero-fied layout by IvIark over on tagboard. checked all parts, no shorts, no bridges, no bad solder, everything tite.
just a sucky ass circuit that's really quite lame.... and with no balls at all. as far as nards are concerned, strictly innies that should be outies i think... a good 6db or so below unity gain. nobody cared way back when, cuz nobody knew that with non-true bypassed peds the crappier circuits would suck the life out of your tone. nope. we were all ga-ga... "holy sheet, batwoman, that thing's all different!!!"
so anywho, decided i'd see what i could do to make it suck a little less.
so i ditched the "tone stack" which is useless. i DID try and make it into a useful tone control in several variations, but... nope. sucked too much life from the circuit. had to gotchem go bye-bye. get it the fuck outta there!
now its got some output, and a fairly useful tone... but seems "pinched"... so the 1n cap in the feedback loop of q1?
OFF WUTH ITS HEAD, THERE, GUV'NOR, I SAY I DID...get it the fuck outta there.
NOW we gotta fuzz that works a bit better... but still nothing special.
so i started going higher and higher in gain.
in the end i went an nte47, high gain lo noise npn... reading close to hFE 2400! for q1
q2 ya can pull out and it makes almost no difference to the circuit. seriously. did i mention i hate this circuit cuz it sucks?
but i still noticed a barely noticeable difference with higher gain q's... finally settled for an mpsa13 with a gain of about 1300. now i had a fuzztone, as well as a bit of boost should i want it at the ass end. but a little ragged and fizzy...
so i added a simple diode clipper, a anti-paralleled pair of bat41's right off the output of the fuzz pot, which, btw, appears to be backwards. i'm not familiar with the original unit really, so its possible it was meant to be turned left to get more treble, but for me, nope. i wanted it to be normal. it barely does shit in the first place.
so i made what everyone calls pin 3 pin 1. much better. now ya turn clockwise for more trebly. barely noticeable, but still... so anyways, now the output of the fuzz pot being pin 1 instead of three, we connect pin 1 of the fuzz pot to pin 3 of the volume pot, and add the diode clipper to ground right off pin 1 of the fuzz. boom. little bit of compression, and the ragged fizzyness is gone.
and what's left behind is a useable silicon fuzz that cleans up pretty well from the guitar controls, that retains quite a bit of the original fuzz's tone, but makes it more useful in a modern context.
enough babble from me. there's two videos. first is for us geeky folks, second is for peeps that have to listen with their eyes.
[youtube][/youtube]
[youtube][/youtube]
remember christopher walken's "the continental" on SNL years ago? "would you like... some chamPAGG-naah?"
decided to change the name of the circuit to the pink-ei compagna fuzz py deux. seemed fitting. i don't know why. don't care.
i liked the end result. maybe you will too. rock on
PjP
