A Brief History Of Fuzz Pedals
September 24, 2024I love fuzz pedals. I love making fuzz pedals and I love playing guitar through fuzz pedals. Although different overdrives or distortions won’t sound the same, I find the variance in sound between these types of dirty pedal is much smaller than the variance in sound you get from different fuzzes. One fuzz circuit will […]
How Does A Drive, Gain, Or Distortion Knob Work?
September 17, 2024I’ve touched on this subject a lot, but I want to approach it differently now. Namely, from the perspective of the potentiometer that is controlling the gain in an overdrive, distortion, or fuzz pedal. When talking about this before, I’ve mostly gone through how clipping diodes work in guitar pedals and how they cause clipping […]
What Is Gain (And How It’s Different From Volume)
September 5, 2024This is going to be a fun article to write (not really), because the concept of gain is actually kind of elusive to define if you’re trying to be general. I’ve always understood the concept of gain as it pertains to guitar pedals (and general guitar oriented analogue electronics). However, as I did some research […]
What’s The Difference Between Overdrive, Distortion, And Fuzz?
July 9, 2024Whether you’re just getting started with guitar effects pedals or already have a collection (whether you’re building them or buying them), you’ve probably heard of overdrive, distortion, and fuzz. Maye you’ve heard these terms used interchangeably or heard they’re similar, but you don’t really know the difference. Gear heads could probably go on and on […]
Vox Tone Bender On Stripboard
June 28, 2024https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZ8r3H4Ztj8 Here’s the Vox Tone Bender, a great early fuzz pedal that’s sure to please. The build I’ve done here is the NPN version of the pedal, so it’s slightly different from the original, which used PNP transistors. The big difference here is that this NPN layout allows for negative ground, putting inline with the […]
Escobedo Harmonic Jerculator On Stripboard
May 28, 2024The Escobedo Harmonic Jerculator is a wonderful little fuzz circuit that packs plenty of punch. This pedal is based on the classic fuzz pedal from Interfax called the Harmonic Percolator. The Harmonic Percolator isn’t made any more, and the geranium transistors used for it are hard to find these days, so the Harmonic Jerculator was […]
Understanding Mid-Scoops And The Big Muff Tone Circuit
February 27, 2024The Big Muff by Electro-Harmonix is another one of those super famous guitar pedals. It has a classic fuzz sound to it with a schematic that’s relatively easy to understand. Sure, it’s quite a bit more complicated that a Fuzz Face, but there’s also a lot more that you can do with it, including tone […]
