Category Archives: Fuzz Face

Baldow, son.

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Man.  MAN!  It has been waaay too long since I had a good post.  I’m gonna try to start posting more stuff here, but its currently summer and way too hot to build anything so I may run thin on stuff to gab about.  I guess I can just start telling jokes then.

First order of note is that there are now some incredible sound clips for the production Balls units on their respective pages.  These were all recorded by Kelly Doyle (hired-gun shred beast) in Houston Texas and I couldn’t be happier with how rad they sound.  Give em a listen!

Now for some FUZZZZ.  The O.G. fuzz face was an incredible pedal but even more incredible is the circuit.  It is seemingly INFINITELY screw-with-able.  You can tweak that thing for days and get new sounds out of it.  People started doing it in the mid-sixties and still do it to this day.  With that spirit in mind I made up this trio of one-knob-fuzzes built around that circuit and dammit if they don’t sound killer.

The first one (blue) was tuned a bit brighter than the standard fuzz face with some added filtering to smooth out the roughness in the fuzz.  Super awesome bright, ringy, sustain chopper!  The second (grey) is flavored after the Italy-produced Vox Tone Benders of the mid sixties.  Its similar to the blue one but more saturated and just JUICIER.  Ugh…it makes me sick even thinking about how good that one sounds.  I think that one is gonna be a production unit soon.  The third (green) drank some weird booze and things got dark.  It has been tuned down to the thick and bassy side and sounds downright evil.  Perfect tool for the sludgehead that lives in all of us.  Each one of these uses a silicon BC108/BC109 transistor pair and has been topped off which a nice little chicken-head knob.

Voltron.

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This fuckin’ thing!!

This was made on request by my buddy Johnny Pockets.  Its a five-up multi effect unit.  The goal seemed to be rooted in ridiculousness, and by god I like that.  The effects in this are (from right to left):

Fuzz Face:  a bog standard silicon transistor fuzz face.  universally awesome fuzz.

Boosters:  two (count-em) two ZVEX super hard-ons, with the trick being that one is always on, and one is switchable.  I have built that booster for a few people that immediately ask for another because they want to leave one on all the time, and switch the other one in as needed. 

Effects loop:  An effects loop in an effect pedal?  YEP.  Sometimes you need to throw some other boxes into your pedal chain, and sometimes you want em in the middle.  So I threw one in here after the dirt section but before the modulation section.  I dont know what you’d want to put in here, necessarily, but I thought a wah went damn well.

Delay:  analog delay based on the Madbean Aquaboy.  RAD sounding delay which can also do some slapback reverb if you really crank down the delay time.  Slapback reverb is kickass.

Tremolo:  using the modified EA tremolo.  a super-solid sounding trem that has the bonus of a whipass boost in it as well!  If you need a THIRD boost (who doesnt, really?) then you can crank down the trem depth and use this as a straight boost.

Phase:  bog-standard clone of the MXR Phase 45, my personal favorite phaser.

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.