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Finally, here's the Big Muff board with Germanium AC-130 transistors in Q2 (hFE 291) and Q3 (hFE 288). SO awesome. Indiana Jackson and the Temple of Awesome.
BTW, this is the Ultrastoner board from Grind Customs FX. With the plain ol' 2N5088 set it was already the kind of Big Muff you dream of owning. Very nice board. This germanium-sandwich configuration is kind of appealing, too.
Q1 is an Input Booster and Q4 is an Output Booster, so they mitigate any bizarre behavior that might occur at Q2 and Q3, which are the Clipping Amplifier stages. Even then, Q2-3 have Emitter and Feedback resistors and Miller capacitors to help assure stability. So the insanely over-designed nature of the Big Muff makes bad ideas like this less problematic.
...your ways are known to me now.
Years ago I remember reading an interview with Adrian Belew about his effects rig. He said that he had an EQ running into his Big Muff because if you hit the input of a Big Muff with enough gain at a certain frequency it would freak out and do cool things.
So today I built this Harmonic Energizer clone in one of the enclosures I powder coated this morning. It's a pedal that Frank Zappa made famous, but it's really just a parametric EQ. So I cranked the gain and made the Q as narrow as possible and swept the frequency. You can hear when it hits the frequency that the Big Muff can't handle. Yeah, there's the Belew infinite sustain thing. Exactly right there.
I should have tried this decades ago. Well, better late than never.
I just put this pedal board together. It puts them all in a nice neat place. Also has a carrying bag for practices and what not.
New tone bypass switch added to an NY Big Muff. I used a small switch so I could install it in the hole previously used for the power jack since I generally use batteries, and could avoid drilling holes that way.
This is a Big Muff Pi clone with a feedback loop. Hence the extra switch and the LDR between the switches. It does some wonderful, noisy, insane, drone stuff in my pedal chain.
Well, we'll see how this transparent waterslide decal looks on unfinished metal. The "Undead Fuzz" will soon come to life!!! Hopefully...
This thing is kind of cool. Someone asked me for a tall font Russian Big Muff clone and I was like, "Dude, I want to try this Canadian Big Muff PCB; I can build it as a tall font Russian, but then it will have these switches..."
It really is pretty cool. I've been wanting an excuse to build out one of these boards for a while.
The first switch on the left removes the clipping diodes from the third gain stage, effectively turning the pedal into a Supa Bender.
The second switch alternates between two diode clipping options on the second stage clipper. In this one that goes from 1N4148 silicon diodes (like the stock Muff) to 3mm red diffused LEDs, which sound SO cool in this circuit.
The third switch is a bass-cut like the Cornish pedal uses. It drops the input capacitor from 100n to 10n. These can be uber-bassy, which is one of the appeals for a lot of people, but if you need it to cut through better, this will do it.
Finally, the last switch cuts the gain of the first and second stages, which is particularly cool in this build because the Russian pedals used higher gain transistors. So this is like a de-Russian-izer.
I just spent some time experimenting with it and (like most pedals) it takes me about five minutes to find my favorite settings and that's probably where it would stay most of the time. It's still cool to have the options, though.
Oh, and it has an optical bypass, so no popping.
Now I've gotta label this thing...I wish hovering could activate pop-ups. Heh...
OK, I took a little time just now to mess with the Depth trimmer on the Heptode.
I didn't mess with the JFET bias. I assume that pad next to the Bias trimmer is to test the bias voltage and I got 4.32 volts off it, which would seem to be about right. Normally you bias to half of supply voltage, which for 9 volts would be 4.5 volts, but taking into account battery power, maybe biasing a little low is prudent...although I'll probably never run it on batteries. Still, I didn't touch the Bias trimmer.
I did tweak the Depth trimmer a tiny, tiny bit. I lowered it just slightly. Really almost an imaginary about. Maybe 1/16th of a turn, which should have had very freakin' little effect, but it seemed WAY better. So I raised it back up to where it had been and it sounded like it sounded when I first plugged it in. Which was good, but not quite as good as the slow speed on the one I built (which was never capable of changing speeds, for those playing the Home Game). So I pulled it back down again and it sounds amazing. So yeah, that seems to be all it was. I know I must have spent an hour setting up the one I built. Which is really a personal preference thing. I get that.
Anyway, sounds great. Also...I know this is goofy, but I did some hammer-on and two-handed tapping stuff into it just to see how I feel about it in comparison to a Phase 90. A Big Muff is actually really cool for hammer-ons. Very fat. Anyway, yeah...this trods all over the posterior of a Phase 90 for that stuff. I don't know why I never got around to trying that with my own board when I assembled it. Maybe I was distracted by none of the speed switches working.
BTW, now the higher speeds on the Heptode actually sound pretty cool. Too much high-frequency whizzing in the signal with the Depth up, but now it's like a Leslie or something at higher speeds. Sounds like when Jimmy Page used to use a Leslie like on stuff like, "Down by the Seaside." Only a little trippier...because it's a phaser.
Excellent effect. Recommended.
Well, it turned out pretty ugly! I'm OK with that, though. It's my own pedal. I don't mind it looking like a terrible industrial accident. It really reinforces the fact that I should never be allowed to do finish work on pedals, though. There's a reason I have others do the work for me most of the time.
This is a turret-board build of a Big Muff fuzz variant. I'm calling it the, "Undead Fuzz." In Brian DePalma's, "Phantom of the Paradise" the record label was, "Death Records" and that dead bird was their logo. The band Swan chose to perform the Phantom's cantata was The Undeads. That's why I called it the, "Undead Fuzz." I'm shooting for the sound that starts off, "Somebody Super Like You."
The last of my new toys just showed up. A Heptode Virtuoso, which is a clone of the original Maestro Phaser.
When coupled with a Big Muff it gets amazingly close to the old Ernie Isley solo tone.
I'm not sure how I could be much happier right now.
Three years ago when I started Fool, the only way I could raise enough money to get it off the ground was by selling nearly all the instruments and effects that I'd accumulated over the last thirty years.
In some cases that felt liberating. You kind of end up making that stuff a part of you, even though some of the purchases were made when I was a much different person. I don't know about anyone else, but once I own something I just find ways to make it work for whatever I need to do, even if it's kind of not the right solution. However, with the old stuff gone, it's been nice occasionally buying something new to sink into.
Case in point, these discontinued reissue Electro-Harmonix Big Muff Pi NYC pedals were being blown out by Sam Ash for $80 with free shipping and I couldn't help myself. I've built Big Muff clones, but I've never owned a real one before. This actually sounds pretty awesome.
Barring some disaster, I'll be making this work for whatever I need to do (involving fuzz) right up until I stop needing to do things.
All the fuzz you ever wanted. Four switches. One is a bass cut like the Cornish. The second one changes the first-stage gain. The third one changes the second-stage clipping diodes to LEDs. The last one removes the clipping diodes from the third-stage clipper, which makes this a Supa Tone Bender. Looks like the transistors are in backwards, but I just used transistors with a reversed pinout and had to flip 'em.