dirt at your fingertips
Put simply, the Fuzz Designer is a basic fuzz circuit, with loads of parameters to tweak. These tweaks give you a massive palette of fuzz sounds.
Switching options
A lot of the fun with these pedals happens when we flick the switches – there are 3 of these:
- Input Buffer On/Off – this buffers the guitar, and presents the fuzz with a bass cut, low impedance drive. Time to turn down the sus and drive!
- Output Buffer On/Off – between the output of the fuzz and the filter / volume. It subtly affects the bass response, and allows you to hear the fuzz unloaded.
- Filter On/Off – this switches in a 1st order passive low pass filter onto the output, to remove extraneous highs.
Fuzz Parameters
Starting with the most “popular”:
- Volume – this will go pretty loud, because we can, and to give the filter circuit more oomf!
- Fuzz – especially useful with an input buffer, anti-log (C) for a smooth transition.
- Filter – filters out the highs… also drops the output level.
- Crackle – shrinks the voltage range of the Fuzz, and makes the output more asymmetrical
- Gate – affects the symmetry of the first fuzz stage, giving a noise gate effect. Similar to Crackle, and can be used together to give a really gnarly sound.
- Sus / Comp – reduces negative feedback, increases sustain / compression especially when the front is buffered.
- Crush – simulates a failing battery on the fuzz section.
Construction
The current builds are completely hand built and hand wired, either on strip board (125BB size) or tag board (large format & clam design)
The default transistor used in these is the trusty 2N5551 for fuzz and output buffer, and the front end buffer is a BS170 MOSFET. These are fitted at build time.
You can opt for replacing any of the devices with transistors of your choice. Transistors I’ve tried, with much success, are a 2SK163 (JFET) in the input buffer, and Russian MP38a (germanium) in the fuzz circuit positions. NPN types are recommended, e.g. AC127, MPSA42, BC109 and BC184.
