For reference, the title is not about fruits, kittens, or apparel. It is instead about the couple of Kiss records when Peter Criss was secretly replaced by Anton Fig. Go figure.
These pedal circuits are nothing new to this blog, just cataloging some of my recent builds. They’ve all been posted here before in one form or another, so search them out if needed.
TS-808 Tube Screamer:
Chill Fraxton!!! Thats about 18 inside-jokes-deep so I wont get into it, but holy shit. Alright then… this here is a clone of the legendary Octavia octave fuzz pedal. The story behind it is that the original was designed by Roger Mayer for Hendrix, and at some point engineers at Tycobrahe got ahold of the original unit and cloned it and sold it as the Tycobrahe Octavia. Its likely a bogus story, but regardless Tycobrahe manufactured *this* version of the Octavia in the 70s, and it is king shit of fuck mountain.
So its an octave/fuzz, which, by the old parlance means a fuzz that gets certain octave overtones, especially as you go higher up on the neck. The fuzz itself is not smooth like a big muff or the like. Its more raunchy and gated sounding. Chords can get really wild sounding, accentuated by the octave effect that happens. Notes shine and sustain well and just sound really big and full.. One nice thing is that the aforementioned gating of the sound works well to hush out any background noise when you arent playing. So it goes from quiet to complete destruction in an instant. A totally amazing fuzz, if you ask me. I’m still messing with it, but this one just might replace the two fuzzes in my personal rig.
I’ve definitely posted about this circuit before, so i’ll keep it to a minimum. The Klon Centaur is basically the end-all for overdrive circuits. Tons of boost, smooth compressed overdrive, and everything in between. If you’ve been tirelessly searching for the perfect overdrive for ages but havent yet been able to find it, this is what you’ve been looking for. Here’s two Klon variants I built recently.
Credit to Ryan “Shaggy” Hull for the title to this post!
Well, this is a big steaming pile of horseshit, aint it? It was a surprise gift/torture device made for the inexcusable Bret Shirley (Black Congress). The deal is that I just built this and sent it to him out of the blue, with no explanation of what did what, only which jacks were ins and which were outs. Call it a grand gesture of “figure it out yourself, dummy!” It’s presented like three modules from a modular synth, but all in one housing. You can feed it a signal via guitar or keys or whatever, and if you’ve really got a death wish you can try to play it on its own with no input. Also each module has a separate in and out, so you can run them in any order you please.
Module 1 (left) is an envelope filter based off of the old DOD 440. The two controls are level and range but they might as well be florp and squawk, because that’s what the circuit does!
Module 2 (middle) is a tremolo based off of the 4MS Tremulus Lune. It is an absolutely fantastic, if not complicated, tremolo. Top two controls are a coarse and fine adjustment for speed, and it lets you go from a rapidly vibrating pulse all the way down to a swell every 2-3 seconds. The other two controls are for depth and spacing. The spacing control is particularly cool because it controls the smoothness of the pulses. You can go from a nice, organic swell up and swell down, or can make it ultra choppy like you’re flicking a switch on and off.
Module 3 (right) is based off of Tim Escobedo’s “Ugly Face” circuit. It is an enormous pile of shit in the best possible way. Its *kind of* a fuzz, but gritty to an extreme, sharp, treble-y, and wildly uncontrollable. I really dont know what I can say about it other than it’s completely terrible and insane and perfect for Bret. What the controls do is a mystery.
Cheech Marin Bret adorned it with a sticker and sent me a pic of it in his noise-making setup which includes, among other things, a keyboard stand.
