Author Archives: ballseffects

Bee Bee Bee Baaaaahhh

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The term “BeeBaa” makes me think of one of my Boston-native friends talking about that adorable pop-sensation Justin Beiber.  This pedal is no teenage girl’s wet dream, though.

The Roland AF-100 BeeBaa was a semi-rare fuzz from the 70’s, with some unique features for fuzzes at the the time.  First off, the fuzz on this is not that mellow psyche-y fuzz that you’re used to from 60’s circuits..  If a fuzz face adds some wool to your sound, the BeeBaa adds a whole box of K-Mart sweaters and a roll of shag carpeting. The controls are pretty standard for a fuzz (volume, tone, sustain) but there is an additional switch to toggle between two fuzz voicings, one more bass-y than the other.  This BeeBaa also features a separate stomp for a treble boost circuit, just like the originals.  This is not a separate circuit entirely, but merely bypasses much of the fuzz circuitry and provides signal boost.  If used right, it can be an excellent way to toggle between a boosted gainy sound to an all out fuzz.

Pic below and sound clip (WHAT!!!) following that.  That’s right, turds, i’ve been asked for clips of some of this stuff and so i’m trying to oblige.  Pardon my awful playing.

         

Cramble on.

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Ahhhhhh holy shit, another ToneBender.  Why another ToneBender?  Because they fucking rule like some knees on some bees.  And because the customer requested it when given the lineup of “uhhh…do you wanna go more Hendrix, Page, or Gilmour with this?”.  Page was picked and so here is a vintage-modern MKII tonebender.

Its largely built as a vintage late-60’s ToneBender would be, but with some modern touches like AC-power, negative ground polarity and an LED to make it a bit more useful in today’s world.  Transistors are WOS (weird-old-stock) germanium Soviet ГТ311Бs selected to appropriate gain specs and biased to taste.  The thing sounds gritty like a fuzz face but more smooth and fat.  I dont know how else to describe it but the thing is kinda *thick* sounding.  Super tight.  Ive also recently fallen in love with these knobs, so they got put to use, and may on future builds as well!




The most polished turd.

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Okay its not a turd.  But for something thats designed to annihilate your guitar’s sound like the Incredible Hulk on a coke bender, I sure chose a classy way to package it up.  This finish looks like fine English leather and the insides sound like a constipated tauntaun.  Ahh…it must be a Noise Swash.

The Noise Swash circuit, at its heart, doesnt look too much different then a standard distortion pedal.  Its not far off from something like a ProCo RAT, but imagine that you took one and added way too many controls.  Instead of a normal, healthy distortion unit, this one lets you starve the whole thing of power, shunt various parts in and out of the circuit, and tweak all sorts of little instabilities which in total amounts to weird, glitchy sounds, and sometimes just making sound on its own.  ZANY.

Controls are: (upper row) Power starve, Noisegate, Swash, Tone, Volume, (lower row) pre-gain, post-gain, pre clipping on/off, post clipping on/off, oscillator on/off, oscillator frequency

Achilles last flan.

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HOLEEE CRAP, its been a while.  Was out of town there for a bit and I just havent gotten much built in a while, or at least not completed.  Here’s one I made prior to my travels for the legendary crambler, Mr. John Adams.  John was looking for a number of things but one thing he was after was some sort of gain box to be used with keys!   Keys arent really my specialty but I started thinking about gain boxes, and preamps of the vintage nature, and came to this dude.

What is it?  Its a clone of the old Echoplex preamp!  What most people dont realize is that in addition to delay, the old Echoplex units were used by countless players simply as preamps/boosters.  This includes Page, Van Halen, etc.  So this is just that….the Echoplex with all the fancy stuff removed, and shoved into pedal form.  Err…..not actually pedal form, though.  By request this guy was made to be an effect box to sit on top of the keyboard, and thus has a toggle for hand operation.  Cramble on.

Banana War.

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Ring Ring Ring Ring Ring Ring Ring……..  This is yet another in the long list of Big Muffs that I will build in my life.  I’ve already raved about the glory of the Big Muff on here, but FUCK are they ever glorious!  Good for that stoner metal fuzz-chunk, and good for those Gilmour/Fripp sustain-city leads.  I dont even know why I bother making them with a sustain knob any more because it needs to be cranked always.  In fact, maybe I should do that….

Anyway, this one is built to the Russian “civil war” unit specs, so named for the blue/grey color scheme the originals came in.  I chose to go with banana-yellow, which is not very civil war at all.  Deal with it.

p.s. yes that was a Raffi joke at the beginning

Horizoning.

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This is an older build for my tight bro Adam Wentworth (Bloodhorse, All Pigs Must Die).  I dont remember specifically what he was looking for or how our conversation went then, only that we decided on building him a Rangemaster. 

What is a Rangemaster, you might ask?  Oh man….have you heard any recordings from any 1960’s or 70’s British rock bands?  There’s probably one of them on all of the guitar tracks.  At the time players were looking for ways to brighten up their dark British valve amps, and Dallas Arbiter developed the Rangemaster.  Its a booster, which helps overdrive your amp, but its also a TREBLE booster.  That means that it boosts your high notes more than your notes, which as you can imagine is great for ripping sustain-rich solos.  The originals weren’t even pedals, they were little boxes that sat on your amp and pretty much stayed on all the time.   The Rangemaster and a Vox AC30 is theee Brian May sound, if that tells you anything.

This Rangemaster was built with an AC187 germanium transistor and also features a tone knob which blends between two input caps to color the sound to your liking.  The knobs are tone and boost.

Also be sure to check out Bloodhorse’s awesome pink floyd spae-metal record HORIZONER.

Re-House party.

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Do you know about the DOD 555-A Performer Distortion?  Its a classic distortion effect that DOD made in the early 80s and man was it a weirdo.  It ran off of TWO 18V power supplies and (surprisingly for a DOD product) didnt blow ass. It actually sounded quite nice in a vintage RAT kinda way.  Good for overdrive, and great for full-up grinder distortion.

Well I had one but the case had just gone to complete shit.  The flimsy DOD switch was busted, the battery door was gone, the knobs were all broken, and the pots were going too.  Solution?  Re-house it in a sturdy enclosure with a rugged-ass switch, new pots and new knobs.  Even better solution?  Make the enclosure gigantic!!!  I also added a small charge-pump board to provide 18V supply off a standard 9V power supply, so no dealing with 2 batteries.  Proceed, shredders.

One stop shredding.

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Who doesnt love the Fuzz Face?  It’s a CLASSIC.  Its what almost every legendary guitar hero in the 60s started with, and while many of them moved on to other fuzzy landscapes, its hard to deny the universal appeal of these badass little dudes.  If you dont love the fuzz face even a little bit, you might just have something terribly wrong with you.

This guy is a relatively stock germanium fuzz face.  Its not completely stock for a few reasons.  First off, tracking down the vintage AC128 or NKT275 germanium transistors is pricey and unnecessary, in my humble opinion.  Second, these original units were of a reverse polarity from most modern pedal devices, which makes using external power supplies complicated, and that just sucks in this modern world.  So fuck all that.  I used some new old stock 2N1302 germs with smashing results.  Everything else is stock values with Sprague and Mallory caps.









 I liked this one so much that I made another, this time using old-stock Soviet germaniums (ГТ311Б!) of  appropriate gain.  Sounds just as sweet and just as fuzzy.










Both of these lil’ ragers are still available at the time of this post.

Scorpin a bub.

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Yet another Foxx Tone Machine!!!  These things are just so cool that I cant help but suggest them to everyone who’s looking for that fuzz they’ve been missing.  This one’s for Josh Valleau (of Imani Coppola’s and John Legend’s bands….seriously).  Think about that next time you hear a fuzz ripper from one of them.

Per Josh’s request this one had no LEDs, and a top-mount for the knobs and octave switch.  Josh picked it up from me Saturday and said he played with it all afternoon and that it was “KILLER”.