Playing with a soldering iron
I got three boards from Pedal PCB. This is a pretty good project. It cost a bit more than the usual 1590B sized projects. It works well and sounds great. I’m keeping one and selling the other two on Reverb as a way to support my hobby. Check this out on my Reverb shop.
Or build your own! I used the PCB from PedalPCB.com. Got most of the parts from Tayda Electronics. Knobs and things from LoveMySwitches.com.
Here’s another Life clone. I’d say this is really an evolution of the Life pedal. It has the octave as a switchable option. The octave comes before the fuzz section and is mixed with the input buffer. Makes for a good heavy sound.
I built three of these. I put one up for sale on Reverb here.
John Hollis Titan boost/octave. This is an op amp input pre amp/booster into a transformer. The transformer is 1k/20k and can output 30v from a 9v battery. The switch inserts a diode bridge for an octave effect.
The sound of the boost warm and clear. The octave effect is pretty good and different from other transformer based effects since the input signal is clean rather than a fuzz tone.
I built this some years ago, and lost the ages on my blog so I thought I’d repost them. This was a idea posted by John Hollis, whatever happened to him?
Wired up this ampeg scrambler board I’ve had for a while. I’ve been trying to finish up all of the unfinished projects from the last few years.
Fired up first test. I used MPSA13 transistors. I got the PCB from John Lyons on DIYStompboxes. It’s the tone pad layout. The layout is set up for different transistor pin arrangements. The MPSA13s were working well, I was thinking to try some others before boxing this up.
Here’s an updated version of the octave fuzz. Q1 and Q2 set up a basic NPN Fuzz Face type circuit. While Q3 acts as a phase splitter. Q4 and Q5 act as a frequency doubler each side being fed an inverted signal from Q3.
So far the Fuzz section is working on the breadboard. The octave section is not working at the moment. I suspect the bias is off. Note the voltage around Q3. The collector and emitter voltages should be close to 4.5V. So far they are pretty far off.
This is an interesting distortion effect with an octave and wah like tone control. I redrew this schem from an issues of Stompboxology.
This is Tim Escobedo‘s Push Me Pull You. It’s an octave up with an interesting design. Using an NPN PNP pair.
