Author Archives: ballseffects

Ballsmasters are back.

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A new batch has been made and they’re available to ship immediately.  I really cant say enough about how great these things sound.  Particularly recommended for those with old plexi-style Marshalls.  They sound like a dream with those amps!

I have been drim.

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Roight.  This one came as a request from my bud Ray “Wisconsin Ray” Walker from Arizona.  Dude said he’s in a new garage band and needs a fuzz pedal, so I reached all the way back to the beginning of fuzz and pulled out this doozie.  Back in the early 60’s there were effects for guitar and organ but they were usually focused on making delay or reverb sounds.  The very first devices for making intentional distortion were fuzz boxes, and this is the very first one of them, the Maestro FZ-1.  This is THE one heard on the Rolling Stones “Satisfaction”, and countless other early american and british garage and psych rock and roll tracks.  It pre-dates the fuzz face and the tone bender, and in some ways it shows it.  It doesnt have the refined, meatier sounds of some of the later fuzzers.  Instead the sound is quite bright and buzzy, but in doing so it stays cool and classic sounding.  You wanted garage….this is garage! 

This version was made using my old standby, the “weird-old-stock” Soviet MП38A germanium transistor.  Controls are Volume and Attack and they should pretty much both be cranked at all times.

**post title courtesy of J Pereira!!!**

Oye Como, Brah

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I’ve written about the legendary ProCo Rat before, but this is version is a little special because it crams a few different Rats into one nice package.  Without getting to techinally mumbo-jumbally, these use the basic Rat topology and play with the clipping diodes to allow for four different voicings which are selectable via the big red knob on the side.  Within the four voicings are the standard rat (sometimes called the vintage rat) and the turbo rat which is a bit louder and more rough than the standard rat.  There’s also a more clipped setting which is a bit more compressed and smooth than the standard rat, and an less clipped setting which is loud as shit, and tougher than RUN DMC.  They all sound killer with guitar, and the latter is a great option for bass distortion as well.  Rip it up!


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"Buy Old Style in a 30 rack or don’t buy it all." – The Bible

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A duo of Rangemasters!  I’ve written about Rangemasters before so i’ll keep this one light.

These were requested by two buds of mine that are doing a one-off Black Sabbath tribute night.  They were searching out that Tony Iommi sound and I told them there’s only one pedal needed: a Rangemaster.  A germanium booster running up into a classic British tube amp like a Marshall or Laney is really all you need to get that thick, goopy overdrive that is all over the first couple of Sabbath records.  Tony’s original rangemaster was supposedly modded, and it sounds like it, but no one knows what the specific modification was.  The most common way to mod this circuit is a switchable input cap to go from treble boost to other ranges of boost. That’s what I did on these 2 units, and by my own tests I think the full-range setting is the most Iommi of them all.

Controls are boost level and a range switch which selects the original treble boost, full range boost, or bass boost. The original delivered units were plain polished aluminum but the new owners made some graphical adjustments to be more in-line with the looks of a vintage unit.  A nice touch for sure….look for a run of these with graphics from me in the future.

A fig in cat’s clothing.

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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:

 
“Russian Green” Big Muffs:

Foxx Tone Machine:
Basic Fuzzes:

 
Digital Delay:

Chill Fraxton.

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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.


 Also built one up in a mirror finish enclosure with an LED for good friend, Ben Murphy:

Overdriving Miss Daisy.

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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!