The next pedal building workshop at Noisebridge will be about building a Fuzz Face. If you’re in the bay Area check out the workshop on meetup!
the Fuzz Face is a classic fuzz circuit with a bit of magic. its one of the earliest fuzz circuits to be developed, it has been played by many famous players, Jimi Hendrix, David Gilmour, Duane Allman, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Pete Townshend, Eric Johnson, George Harrison, Kevin Parker, and more!
Why is the Fuzz Face popular? It sounds great. It also cleans up as you roll the volume back your guitar, this allows you to control the amount of fuzz from your instrument, allowing for dynamic performance.
You can still buy a Fuzz Face from Dunlop, but why do that when you can make your own for almost nothing! The Fuzz Face is just two transistors and a handful of other parts.
We are going to build Silicon Fuzz Face from DAM called the Meathead. This is a great sounding version of the Fuzz Face, that uses easy find parts.
How are we going to build it? For this project you will use prototyping board called vero board or strip board. This is PCB with strips of copper. Rather than making a custom PCB you’ll plan your design so parts that are connected together are soldered to the same copper strip.
Your goal is to arrange the parts so that all of the connections match the schematic, with the connections landing the copper strips.
The task may looking pretty intimidating but don’t worry, I’ve created a layout for you!
Your goal is to get all of the correct part values into the locations on the board matching the picture above. You can reference the schematic for support. To do this you need a piece of strip board with 13 rows and 13 columns.
I’ve planned this so that the 500k pot is mounted to the board. This will have trouble wiring and give the board something to be mounted to when everything goes into the enclosure.
Here are some pictures of my test build.
I’ll post some information about wiring the switch, jacks, and LED, and putting this whole thing in a box in a future post.
Strip board is a popular way to create one off pedal builds. Guitar pedal layouts done for strip board are all over the internet. Check out some these sites.
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