Silicon Tone Bender

[mictester]

The closest transistors I have to BC109c is some black plastic case BC549c Si NPN transistors,these are described as low noise hi gain transistors,I measured the gains of some of them which turned out to be as high as 700 or so,these should work okay,shouldn't they?

They will work really well. The BC549C was (effectively) the plastic cased replacement for the BC109C. It is a low noise device too, which helps tame the dreaded hiss.

[mcaviel]

...and sometimes I can't keep up with the demand for them!

So start a waiting list .

BTW it's a great design and very useful, what is the "James" type tone control?

[mictester]

...and sometimes I can't keep up with the demand for them!

So start a waiting list .

BTW it's a great design and very useful, what is the "James" type tone control?

The "James" control circuit is a passive, two knob tone control circuit. It needs the correct (calculated) source and load impedances, but it's capable of a very wide range of control including mid scoop, mid boost, top boost, top cut and so on. It's quite lossy, but is ideal at the back end of a pedal with high output (like the Silicon Tonebender or the Big Muff Pi). I'll put the schematic up later.

[DrNomis]

Cool,mictester,it just so happens that I have quite a few of those BC549c transistors,I've built a 4 transistor Big Muff Pi stompbox using 4X BC549c transistors,it worked really well,the sound and sustain was very smooth for a circuit that very heavily hard clips,I tried two BC549c in a Fuzz Face,
and got a very smooth sound out of it after I set the bias so that I had 4.5V on the second transistor's collector,only drawback was a tendency for the pedal to oscillate at some very high radio frequency,possibly something like 200 or 300Mhz,I tried putting a 100pf ceramic capacitor across the transistor from the collector to the emitter,that seemed to cure it.


Well,I'm going to try building the Silicon Tonebender with those BC549c transistors,and will let you know what my results were...

[mictester]

Well,I'm going to try building the Silicon Tonebender with those BC549c transistors,and will let you know what my results were...

I hope you like it - it's going to be very LOUD!

[DrNomis]

If it is anything like my home made Ge transistor based Tonebender Professional Mk2 pedal that I modded to give more output by substituting a 4k7 for a 470 ohm resistor,and replaced the 8k2 third transistor collector resistor for a multiturn 20k trimpot for bias setting,I think I sure will like it mate,can't wait to get started,I'm right in the middle of building a Baja Real Tube Overdrive pedal,so the silicon Tonbender will have to wait in line....

[soggybag]

I've been playing with the trim pot. I can't quite get to "splatty" fuzz, but it does start to oscillate too far one direction. I guess "splatty" is different thing to different people.

I should have used a better trimmer. I used a cheap open frame type. It works fine but looks like it's going to fall apart. It's also hard to adjust with any detail. I guess this really doesn't need to much precision really.

Overall sounds great. Very thick fuzzy. I mostly like the tone knob in the low range. At the high end I get a little too much of that high frequency white noise type sound. I wonder if a small cap on the output to ground might be a good way to deal with this?

I've been playing through a guitar with a single bridge position P90. The guitar favors the highs. This could also effect the sound. The tone may be different through a humbucker.

I'll have to give the fat switch a try. I didn't include it on the board. I figure I can add a switch with a couple jumpers and solder one cap directly to the switch.

Have to find some time to drill a box.

[DrNomis]

A small capacitor to ground on the output should get the high end under control,try a value of say 470pf,another thing to try is putting a 100pf capacitor across the collector-emitter of transistor 2 and 3,that should tame the high end too...

I like to use blue plastic multiturn sealed trimpots,the vertical mounting types,they cost a bit more than standard trimpots,but I think it is worth it,the extra prescision makes it easier to get the biasing just right,I try to set the biasing so that I have 4.5V on the collector of the third transistor,to my ears,this gives a very smooth fuzz sound,on an oscilloscope,you will see a square shaped waveform,one thing I did notice is if you set the biasing so that the voltage on the third transistor's collector,is higher or lower than 4.5V,you end up with an asymetrical waveform,a good thing to try is to set the bias so that the waveform is more clipped on the top than the bottom,not too much though because you'll end up with a very thin sound,try to get the bottom to be clipped for say 1 third of one complete cycle,you'll find it will sound pretty close to valve distortion,and it will have an interesting harmonic change as you sustain a note....

[DougH]

I am interested.

Good! Here's the high-gain version. This sustains for weeks!

Modded-SiliBender.GIF

Interesting...

Looks like he completely ripped the tone control section (not to mention the rest of it) out of the Hot Silicon:



First this, then Blencowe's booster.

Mictester, you are a charlatan and everything you contribute as "original" is suspect.

[DougH]

Here's his schem so you can compare:



I want everyone on this board to know where this stuff really comes from. I've told this story before. Aron added a hot cake tone control to a Ge tonebender. Gus did the Si tonebender. I combined the two ideas. Too much of a coincidence for mictester's version to have come from anywhere else- esp when you consider the "glass blower" incident.

I am interested.

Good! Here's the high-gain version. This sustains for weeks!

Modded-SiliBender.GIF

Interesting...

Looks like he completely ripped the tone control section (not to mention the rest of it) out of the Hot Silicon:



First this, then Blencowe's booster.

Mictester, you are a charlatan and everything you contribute as "original" is suspect.

[mictester]

Doug. Just to explain something to you:

The silicon Tonebender at the beginning of this thread came out of MY attempts to make a Macari's original silicon effort sound good back in the summer of 1994.

A friend brought an old Macari Tonebender 'round to my house because he'd found it in his loft, and found that the battery that had been in it since the 1970s had rotted all over the insides. It still had the Macari price sticker underneath it! He asked if it could be mended. I cleaned the mess out of it, replaced the battery clip, and tried it out. It sounded truly horrible, and just made nasty raspberry sounds.

I took a look at the voltages around the transistors and cleaned the PCB some more, because I assumed that there was still some battery debris shorting something out. It sounded no better, and the voltages were all over the place. At this point, I decided that it would be better to retain the case and knobs, replace the pots, sockets and PCB and try again. I drew out the original circuit from the board (my friend claimed that it had sounded "OK" when it was new), and built it on Veroboard.

It worked, but sounded horrible - mostly because it was wrongly biased. I tweaked away at the resistor values until it started sounding good. I found that the "Fuzz" control didn't do much, and tried a larger value in there. I found that it worked over a small part of one end of the track, so replaced it with the original value pot and a series preset.

The original one had two input capacitors wired in parallel (one soldered to the track side of the board) so it looked like either it had been modified at some stage, or Macaris changed the value. I found that I could get two distinctly different tonal characters by switching the input cap, so that's what I did. My brother called the switch "Thick / Thin" on his reproduction of the one that I got going. He made about fourteen or fifteen of the things at the time, some of which ended up in the 'States.

The tone control on the original was a simple treble cut - just a pot and capacitor in series - and didn't do much. My brother's first version had a Big Muff tone control tacked on to the end, and that was much more use. A later one I tried to build had an active tone control, but that proved to be mostly hopeless. The scooped Big Muff tone control didn't sound right to me, so I messed with it until I got something that had a good range of useful tones. My brother called the control "Sparkle" because that's what it sounded like! I called the Fuzz control "Abuse" because that's what it did to the waveshape.

If I wanted to be churlish, I could suggest that YOU, or someone YOU know, saw one of the ones WE built, and copied the circuit. However, since I don't indulge in name calling (apart from at the Boutique Solder Jockeys who need to be roundly abused at all times!), I'm not going to suggest anything underhand at all. Perhaps you came up with a similar circuit - after all, the early "Maestro" fuzz boxes were "reinvented" all over the world!

Also - the Class H buffer amp that this "Blencow" character has come up with may be similar to mine - it was alike enough that the magazine article annoyed me. My circuit sketches were from the mid-90s, and the designs were abandoned in the early 2000s.

The differences were that I originally used a bootstrapped input stage to raise the input impedance, but found that (particularly on stage) the large electrolytic in the input could be microphonic, leading to feedback problems, so I reverted to a standard high input impedance non-inverting stage.

The output stage was used on its own - it was a sub-board built as the output stage of some stage effects boards. My early boards used 12 Volt Nicad batteries to power everything, and it was sometimes useful to send a higher voltage signal across a long lead in a noisy stage environment. There was a desire at the time to avoid the use of radio links and the like on stage. The circuit was developed from ideas lifted from "The Art of Electronics" and an article in JAES.

I hope that this explains where I'm coming from. If you don't like the explanations, then that's your problem. I don't like being accused and abused - all I've ever tried to do is contribute some electronic expertise to this forum (which I prefer to the others out there).

Finally - I'll happily withdraw form this forum altogether if this continues.

[alnico]

This makes no sense... you're describing a Tone Bender that never was. There was no MkII with a simple treble cut tone control and no MkII type circuits were made on PCBs anyway. MkIIIs onwards were PCB, but they bear no relation to your schematic, even as a point of origin.

Can you elaborate on which version of the TB you started with?

[ckyvick]

^WHERE did he say mkii???? I believe he is referring to the Jumbo/MKIII SILICON TONEBENDER relased under Macari

[mictester]

This makes no sense... you're describing a Tone Bender that never was. There was no MkII with a simple treble cut tone control and no MkII type circuits were made on PCBs anyway. MkIIIs onwards were PCB, but they bear no relation to your schematic, even as a point of origin.

Can you elaborate on which version of the TB you started with?

It was a 1970s grey boxed Colorsound box with three knobs and the word "Tonebender" in yellow letters curving around the bottom and right edges of the front (top) panel. It had three black knobs with chromed tops, and the footswitch was a DPDT but wired SPDT (we changed it for proper bypass). It had a "Macari's" price sticker on the bottom and two small self-tapping screws held the bottom on. It had two areas of serrated rubber underneath to stop it slipping. It was obviously really cheaply made, and probably had (in the 70s) much less than £5 worth of parts in it, with plastic domed-top silicon transistors (probably PN108 - they were really cheap and plentiful at the time - I bought 200 of them from "Henry's" for about £4 as I remember). The capacitors were the stripy "tropical fish" types and it had axial electrolytics. Unfortunately I threw the original PCB away, as there was quite a lot of corrosion where the battery had attacked it and it didn't seem worth keeping at the time.

One unusual thing I remember - it used the input socket to switch the power on, but instead of using a stereo socket, it had a "make" contact that was operated by the sleeve of the jack plug. I had to repair it again in 1998 or so because the owner broke the battery connector, but other than that it was excellent and he used it at every gig.

The one I rebuilt was in regular use until 2001 when the guy who owned it died suddenly. His wife sold off his guitars a year or two later, but I don't know what happened to his back-line or effects gear (he borrowed and never returned my Space Echo!).

My brother was considering making a few more of these, and has gone as far as raiding my transistor stocks and spray painting some diecast boxes!

[HEAD]

Hi Mictester,

please stay here - otherwise it would be a great loss. Whether if some things are original or not doesn't bother me. The only that for me counts is what you contribute and if it's at least a discussion about some circuits and their ancestors - some of them have been burried so deeply in that many of us won't remember or even don't know before. It can't be denied that you what you're doing. Profiting of your knowledge and experience is - at least for me - a pleasure.
But to calm down both sides (BOTH!): Everything has been made somewhere somehow before. There's nothing realy new under the sun.

Helge

[DougH]

Check the Sweet Thing tone control:



This part of this circuit has not changed since 2000. I adopted this from an early (probably incorrect) Hot Cake schematic. Note the .022u and my notes on the 2.2k. I believe the HC schematic I used had a 1k instead of 2.2k there. Aron added this to his Ge tonebender "Hot Fuzz". I could not find that schematic, sorry. When I built the Hot Silicon, I tweaked the .022u to a .0082u by ear, like the 2.2k.

Hmmm... Now we see both the 2.2k -and- .0082u show up in the "silicon tonebender" schematic last year, 2009.

Coincidence?

I think not.

Add to that a nearly part-by-part facsimile of Blencowe's "Glass Blower" and wild claims by someone who hides behind a handle that somehow his circuit was ripped off. Who ripped off who?

Look, I don't make a penny off of building pedals and amps. I've been doing this for 36 years, been involved with internet hobby groups for about 12. Things I share are public domain and I don't care what people do with them. The Hot Si is an integration of multiple ideas that are not mine. I've always been honest and up front about where my ideas come from. I expect others to be honest about the source of their contributions too, especially on a forum where people are doing this for fun, as a hobby. Anything less is pathetic.

I know two people can arrive at the exact same solution in parallel. But the probability is low, esp in this case given the history. The freestompboxes community can judge for itself. I'm just providing some information you might want to consider.

[DougH]

Edit: Here's Aron's Hot Fuzz:

[mictester]

Check the Sweet Thing tone control:
This part of this circuit has not changed since 2000.

That's a blatant rip-off of MY work from the 1980s.

I adopted this from an early (probably incorrect) Hot Cake schematic. Note the .022u and my notes on the 2.2k. I believe the HC schematic I used had a 1k instead of 2.2k there. Aron added this to his Ge tonebender "Hot Fuzz". I could not find that schematic, sorry. When I built the Hot Silicon, I tweaked the .022u to a .0082u by ear, like the 2.2k.

The values you ripped off from me were "determined by ear". They were what my friend liked when we subbed in a few values.

Hmmm... Now we see both the 2.2k -and- .0082u show up in the "silicon tonebender" schematic last year, 2009.

Coincidence?

I think not.

No you've ripped off my design.

Add to that a nearly part-by-part facsimile of Blencowe's "Glass Blower" and wild claims by someone who hides behind a handle that somehow his circuit was ripped off. Who ripped off who?

That should be quite obvious by now. My stuff has been copied for years. Simply because it works reliably, and sounds good.

Look, I don't make a penny off of building pedals and amps. I've been doing this for 36 years, been involved with internet hobby groups for about 12. Things I share are public domain and I don't care what people do with them. The Hot Si is an integration of multiple ideas that are not mine. I've always been honest and up front about where my ideas come from. I expect others to be honest about the source of their contributions too, especially on a forum where people are doing this for fun, as a hobby. Anything less is pathetic.

Your perpetual whining about being ripped off is entirely pathetic. I've been building guitar gear since the mid-sixties. I've made a lot of money doing it - not by ripping off other people's ideas (though I do like the Big Muff and have made versions of it), but by being a good engineer, with a comprehensive understanding of the underlying electronic principles of each circuit I work on.

I know two people can arrive at the exact same solution in parallel.

That's happened to me twice in the music electronics field - once with a product based on the datasheet for an MN-series BBD, and once for an application of the That 4301 VCA. In both cases, other engineers came up with commercial products that were so similar - even down to exact component values and precise filter turnover points - that you would claim they were copied. I know that the design process by which these circuits were arrived at was very similar - both of us had a similar design aim.

But the probability is low, esp in this case given the history. The freestompboxes community can judge for itself. I'm just providing some information you might want to consider.

Maybe in your little world. The "Hot Silicon" that you've posted in a subsequent entry here is actually quite significantly different to the thing that I came up with. I claimed no huge originality for my version - it was, after all, based on a Macari's Tonebender that didn't work properly. I tweaked the values to something sensible, and with a few listening tests and component substitutions, came up with something that a lot of people like.

If you want to persist with this silly ranting of yours, go ahead, but you'll do it without me. As far as I'm concerned, this topic is closed. There are just a few things for you to bear in mind:

1. The silicon bender was a corruption of a nasty Macari's effort that didn't work properly, made in an effort to make a pedal that looked and sounded "vintage". It had NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with anybody else's efforts (apart from the idiot who put the wrong components in the Macari's board).

2. I don't know Blencow from a bar of soap, but his published effort in Elektor looked like it had been directly ripped off from an old design that I used to use in battery-powered pedal boards about 15 years ago. It annoys me that you see fit to stand up for this charlatan who's obviously got hold of one of my old products and copied it. Either that, or there's an example of parallel development - it's happened to me twice before (see above).

3. I have made enough money from guitar electronics over the last 40 years to pay for a nice holiday house, a car, and several good holidays a year - and it's just my hobby, NOT my professional job. My full-time professional work pays me several times more per year than I get from guitar electronics. I neither have the desire or the need to rip anyone off. The only rip-off I suffer is from the Taxman.

4. I have a number of guitarist friends who buy pedals from me because they like their sounds and their reliability. I seldom have to mend one. They're certainly not going to stop visiting my house to try and buy gear because someone on the other side of the planet falsely believes that I've "ripped off their circuit".

Game Over.

[mictester]

Edit: Here's Aron's Hot Fuzz:

Can't you see the difference? The one you're showing here is germanium based. Mine is silicon. As Bugs would say "What a maroon!"

Definitely Game Over.

[DougH]

Edit: Here's Aron's Hot Fuzz:

Can't you see the difference? The one you're showing here is germanium based. Mine is silicon.

Go back and read the thread. You'll see where it fits in.