Sometimes you have to buy a new guitar. Sometimes you just give in. I saw this and was inspired. Not sure why, it does have a unique look. I figured the expense was not justified. After thinking about this for a week, I came up with the idea to hawk some old junk on ebay.…
Whenever I build something I usually build two. The parts are cheap. If I make a mistake or the PCB doesn’t etch correctly I have a spare. If you build the first and it doesn’t work you can build the second and compare the two. In the case of the Silicon Tone Bender I used…
I built this Silicon Tonebender posted by mictester over on Freestompboxes. I used this layout. Everything worked the first try and it sounds good. I used BC109CN for transistors. These sounded good and have that metal can with a little tab mojo. I used a ceramic .1µf cap for the input cap and skipped the…
If you are into making things with electronics you probably need to test them out from time to time. Paul Falstad has a really great on line circuit simulation app. It’s a Java applet. Try it out here: http://falstad.com/circuit/ Here’s a picture of a Fuzz Face I mocked up. Notice the scope at the bottom.…
Here’s a new drawing from the Stompbox Cookbook. This is a passive mid control. Could be a good alternative to the standard Guitar treble roll off type tone control. The pot should be a dual gang linear.
This is a Roland Bee Baa Fuzz. It’s sort of a booster followed by a two transistor silicon fuzz. The sounds is pretty heavy and doom like. Interpret that how you will. The original came in a larger case with three stomp switches on top, bypass, boost, tone. I used stomp switches for the boost…
I traded a Fuzz Factory Clone for what looks like an old PA that’s been modified to work as a guitar amp. The Webcor has two speaker connected with what looks like a giant oil and paper capacitor. One speaker looks to be about 6 inches across and the other is about 4 inches. There…
I just started building up a project and I realized the PCB layout I printed from the Stompbox Cookbook is backwards! Beware if you plan to build a project from any of these layouts. I think I can save my build by either bending the IC pins over so the chips are upside down, or…
I’ve been fascinated by the Stompboxology and Stompbox Cookbook projects for a long time. I’ve only built a few and many of the ideas are hit and miss. The concepts presented are compelling none the less. The Distort-o-matic VI for example, uses a very off the wall concept. The input signal is imposed on a…
Here’s a my take on the LED compressor thing. Really this is just a “mash up” of mictester’s “Really Cheap Compressor and the John Hollis Flatline compressor. You could look at this as the Flatline with a simplified LED driver. Or, the Really Cheap Compressor with a non-inverting amplifier stage. This hasn’t been tested. It…
After playing around with this for a while I find reducing the gain on the input stage seems to get rid of the harsh noise from a hot input. Not sure if this will work for every circumstance, but it did work for my guitar. To make up for the reduced output I modified the…
Here’s a picture of an Ugly Face I made recently. For the graphics on this I used PnP. Not sure how this is going to work out. This is second effect I did with this method. This one came out better than the fist. ‘