Built Jack Orman’s Son of Screamer last night. Fired up the first time and sounds pretty good. I have not owned a Tube Screamer before. After building this I’m understanding the complaints about the “mid hump” in the sound. The sound is very focused in the mid range.

There seem to be many mods for this floating about. So I thought I’d build a second one to compare to the first. I picked out the LovePedal Eternity. There is a good thread about this one here.

From the schematic it looks like the Son of Screamer with a few changes in parts values. From what I can see it seems the Eternity just increases the lows as described in this article Muzique.com.

Of course the next step is make the RunOffGroove Tube Reamer for a final comparison. Looks like the Tube Reamer adds event more.

It looks C2 is increased from .047 to .1, from SOS to Eternity, and doubled again to .22 in the Tube Reamer.

This is an interesting distortion effect with an octave and wah like tone control. I redrew this schem from an issues of Stompboxology.

Here’s another unique design by Tim Escobedo.

This is Tim Escobedo‘s FET Driver.

This is another fine little Distortion by Tim Escobedo. I think this sounds pretty good. The sound can go from mildly distortion/overdrive to over the top almost metal. It can also get some splatty fuzz tones and a soft attack.

This is Tim Escobedo‘s Push Me Pull You. It’s an octave up with an interesting design. Using an NPN PNP pair.

Another very original design by Tim Escobedo. This an octave up with a sitar like sound.

This is Way Huge Swollen pickle clone I made. This is basically a Big Muff with using a 14 pin DIP that contains 4 transistors. The tone control also has a pronounced mid scoop compared to the original Big Muff.

I etched this design on the box. The design is based on flames in Tibetan art. I named the box the Shiva Sonic. I figure as the god of destruction and rebirth, Shiva was an appropriate deity for the sound of the Big Muff.

This is a layout for the Big Muff that would fit in a B sized box. It is set up to use a 14 pin DIP since I used a quad transistor array. The pins on this chip are arranged such that you you could use this layout with regular transistors inserted into a 14 pin DIP socket. If you look carefully you can see that I’ve marked the pins E, B and C

I just built up Jack Orman’s FET Muff. This is Big Muff built with FET’s instead of BJT’s. When I created the layout I had the idea that I would keep all of transistors in line so I could use a length of milmax header. I think this made for a better construction. It led to a more organized layout. Though it did cause a couple headaches with component placement.

This is an Ugly Face by Tim Escobedo. I think the sound is pretty good. It makes a sort of pulse width modulated square wave via the guitar signal driving a 555. Not for every occasion. But the sound it makes it makes well. I really like this thing, so much in fact that I’ve made 3 so far.

Here’s a layout that would fit in a B sized box.

Here’s a modification of Tim’s original scheme that adds a blend knob. The blend knob mixes between the signal coming out of the 386 and the signal coming out of the 555. This adds an extra knob to the build, which makes for a pretty tight arrangement. The 16mm pots would work. But, 12mm pots with 1/2″ knobs would work well. Something like this at Mouser.com These pots are the same as the typical pots but they have a 12mm diameter body. A 1/2″ knob is about the same diameter.