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 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
This was my second time building a Jordan Bosstone Fuzz. The first one was one of the best fuzz circuits I had ever played, but somehow I misplaced the board after having it in a multifx box. I wanted to recreate that magic so I built this one.
What a cool sounding fuzz! The trumpeting is spectacular, and depending on where you set the controls you can get quite a few distinct sounds.
There are three videos here… one video is the build, one is the demo, and the other is from when I received the parts in the mail.
Jordan Bosstone Parts Haul:
Jordan Bosstone Build Video:
Jordan BosstoneFuzz Demo: