Silicon Tone Bender

Here is a Silicon Tone Bender built around four BC109 transistors. It sounds pretty good!

The original circuit was provided by user Mic Tester over at FreeStomboxes.org. I built this some years ago on a piece of strip board. I ended up selling it at the Musicians Electronics Swap meet in Berkeley.

Here are some pictures of the build and my notebook page with schematic I copied.

I got an email from the guy who said they were still using it and liked the sound. So I thought I’d give this an update. I put the schematic into Eagle PCB.

I created a layout and had some boards made through PCBWay.com. I got these done in a group with 5 other boards (see my previous post) which kept the costs down. I left a notch in the upper corner to allow for the DC jack. This is an experiment. It looks good on paper. We’ll see how it works in the build.

The build was pretty easy. I had to sub one cap for a close value, since i didn’t have the exact value on hand. Everything went together well. I’ll be posting this to the PCBWay.com shared service soon!

Everything should fit easily into a 1590B sized box. This is my preferred format!

The board is designed with the pots and LED integrated. The of board connections are all at the bottom of the PCB. This makes for an easy build.

I milled an enclosure but the settings were a little off and the engraving was a little deeper intended, so lines came out a little more heavy handed then I had planned.