Guitar talk, and easy guitar lessons from beginner to jazz with Birdsnake Brown
One thing is for sure, these flat hat transistors look super cool! They sound great too. I originally had some trouble with transient sounds on the note decay but with a good bias setting that went away. I ended up selling it on reverb to make space for more fuzz pedals.
The volume knob clean up is very good, but this fuzz pedal really excels when the guitar volume knob is on 10. Wall of fuzz! The transistors are NPN so they work with regular pedal power, although it sounds better on batteries.
I am lucky to have a stockpile of these PNP Germanium transistors from Russia because they sound fantastic! They are super low leakage and completely temperature stable.
This fuzz cleans up beautifully with the guitar volume but still compresses nicely when you turn the guitar up to 9 or 10.
I ended up selling this one on reverb and I plan to build more of them in the future.
The trick is to get a perfect combination of your guitar’s volume control and settings on the fuzz. Input resistance and voltage bias, as well as the fuzz’s volume and fuzz controls all play a role.
There are so many sounds to be had from the Fuzz Face circuit! Everything from sparkly clean crunch to extreme wall of distortion tones can come out of one of these boxes. There are also many great tones to be had by using the guitar volume knob with a fuzz face and I talk about that extensively here.
In this video I discuss using input resistance, guitar volume, and bias settings. The fuzz face is very sensitive to all of these little changes.
Input resistance almost works better to control the distortion than the actual fuzz control, and on a fuzz face the bias control can take it from splatty dirt to sparkly grit with great clean up.
I still consider this the best fuzz I’ve ever owned… it’s just one of those magic sets of transistors I guess.
This was one of my favorite fuzz faces. I ended up selling it on reverb but I do have a set of these transistors left for a rainy day.
I used a .1uf poly cap for the input, and a .01 for the output, so it’s not as bass heavy as a stock fuzz face.
The 2G308 transistors clean up really well with the guitar volume knob, but they also get a huge sound with the volume all the way up.
I originally built this Tone Bender clone way back around 2010 but the wiring was sloppy and it ended up just a circuit board in a box. More recently I decided to rewire it and give it a permanent enclosure.
The OC75 transistors were in some of the original units and they truly sound fantastic in this build. I got them matched from Small Bear Electronics way back in the day.
The MKII circuit can go from splatty gated fuzz to something smooth and violin-like depending on how you bias it and where the controls are set.
Here are three videos of this Tone Bender. First the build, then some demos.
Tone Bender MKII Fuzz Build:
Tone Bender with a Stratocaster Demo:
Tone Bender MKII with a Les Paul