sadly Small Bear Electronics is closing down. I have been buying parts from them for what could be 20 years now! My memory is failing me but has to be close to 20 years. They were pretty much the first to provide parts for the DIY stompbox community. I’m showing this picture of a Fulltone…

Tried a new service: PCBWay.com. I used one of the boards I had designed in EAGLE PCB. PCBWay PCBWay looks like a larger service with more to offer. They have a lot of options and it’s a bit of a maze to navigate. For your effort they also offer some services not offered by OSH…

Here are two more Haunting Mids fuzz. These came out pretty good. Check out the project page you can order PCBs from OSH Park and build your own! This is a great sounding Big Variant. It’s unique in that it does have a tone control. The tone section is removed and the output is taken…


I made some ugly face PCBs back in 2009 and had a couple left over. I built this up when I first got the mill. The Ugly Face is a DIY classic invented byTim Escobedo way back in the early mid 2000s if I recall. It’s a unique circuit with a surprising sound if you…
This is another Big Muff clone. It’s a green Russian built with a Madbean PCB. I milled the enclosure. Big Muff clone was originally published on Super-Freq

This is another Big Muff clone. It’s a green Russian built with a Madbean PCB. I milled the enclosure.

Another Fuzz Factory clone. I used silicon transistors for this build I didn’t have any germanium transistors with the right gains. I think lower gain silicon works best here. I used a couple 2N5401 with gains of 115 and 120. These were about the lowest gain I could find in my parts bin. I ordered…

Want to build your own effects pedals? A good place to start is understanding how transistors work. Transistors are those three-legged devices seen populating many stompbox circuits. Transistors are a core building block in electronics. Integrated circuits, like op-amps, are made up of many transistors! Transistors are used in all of the circuits you’ve heard…
Forbidden Planet is a movie from 1956. It featured a sound track and sound effects entirely created by electronic circuits. I say circuits because this was 8 years before Robert Moog would produce the first synthesizer. The sound track was produced by Bebe & Louis Barron using circuitas invented for the purpose and test equipment.…

build your own Ugly Face! Ugly Face is a racus squarewave guitar synth oscillator disguised as a fuzz pedal. Originally created by Tim Escobedo on his Circuit Snippets web page, it’s become a DIY classic. The ideas here are great and inventive there are a lot of building blocks. Out of all of these the…

The Vulcan is a heavy over to distortion by Joe Davisson. Check his Analog Alchemy page for more of his designs. Here’s a discussion of the circuit over at the DIYStompboxes forum. I created a PCB you can order at OSH Park. Part Value C1 100n C2 100n C3 100n C4 2n2 C5 100n C6…