Guitar talk, and easy guitar lessons from beginner to jazz with Birdsnake Brown
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.
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