Are you better off building your own fuzz pedal?
Ad Feature with StewMac
Fuzz pedals! Those gloriously angry little boxes that bring the sweetest kind of tonal devastation to your rig. They’re the first effect to be condensed down into a little stompbox, and their wonderfully fuzzy sounds have inspired generations of guitarists ever since Satisfaction blew everyone’s minds.
And the best fuzz sounds out there don’t have to come from $500 boutique boxes – they can come from projects that you make yourself, either out of a kit or from the ground up. There’s an unmistakable joy that comes from playing something you’ve created yourself –are you always better off building your own fuzz?
Getting building
You might have seen a lot of buzz around DIY fuzzes, and been curious as to how to enter this world. You will need a bit of kit if you don’t have it already. First off is a good soldering iron, which is essential for all but the most basic of DIY pedal kits. You’ll also want a good set of flush cutters for trimming component legs and cutting wire to length, as well as wire strippers, wrenches to tighten things. And finally an often overlooked part of the assembly process is a PCB holder – these are absolutely worth the investment, as they make populating a PCB or veroboard a breeze! If all that kit seems a bit overwhelming, StewMac luckily offers a pedal building tool kit, as well as the individual parts if you just need to top up your workbench to be pedal-ready.
So, why build a fuzz? There are a lot of reasons – let’s dive into a few.
A teachable moment
Image: Cillian Breathnach
You can read up on electronic circuits all day – but, when it comes to musical equipment, there’s perhaps no better way to learn than getting practical and hearing the results right away. Fuzz pedals are an awesome way into the world of pedal building, mainly because they’ve generally got a low parts count, which makes them pretty approachable to actually put together. But their simpler design also means that small adjustments go a long way – there’s more immediacy between your design decisions and the resulting sound.
If you’re just starting out, I’d say that getting a simple one-knob fuzz under your belt first is a far better idea than trying to start with a multi-mode dual-PT2399 modulated delay. And, of course, the resulting sound of a fuzz is one of the most glorious aspects of playing guitar – few experiences on this instrument are quite as gratifying as a really good fuzz pedal into a loud amp.
So, where to start? Using veroboard, also known as stripboard, is a great way to get into ground-up builds, mainly because it’s a flexible base for whatever layout you want to throw at it. Buy a chunk of veroboard and the right components, and you can get a good few practice builds under your belt fairly quickly, building essential soldering skills and a good understanding of signal-path basics. There are lots of community-sourced tagboard layouts out there for different effects – if you’re building low numbers of pedals for your own enjoyment, it’s just as good as a PCB, even if it requires just a little more patience.
Kits are, of course, more one-and-done – you don’t need to worry about sourcing any part of the build, as the enclosure and all on- and off-board parts are included. To get started, check out StewMac’s selection of kits here.
Whatever substrate you’re using, basic fuzz circuits are very moddable. Fuzz Face- and Tone Bender-inspired builds will let you quickly make big adjustments with only minor tweaks, and even in more parts-heavy builds, there are often common modifications that the community on places like Reddit and freestompboxes.org will recommend and guide you through. And while you can start out by messing about and swapping out the odd part here and there, you’ll likely soon be calculating filter roll-offs and sourcing obscure germanium transistors off eBay – which brings us to customisability.
Truly your own
Image: Cristian Storto / Getty
We’re not just talking aesthetics here, although that does come into it. Off-the-shelf fuzz options will generally have a pretty broad appeal, tonally. But once you’ve got the basics down, making your own fuzzes lets you get really specific in chasing that ideal tone, in some cases much more so than modding a pre-built fuzz would. Plus, that’s less and less possible these days, with modern surface-mount builds making it far harder to perform circuit tweaks.
For example – clipping diodes. Not all fuzzes use them, but for ones that do – like the Big Muff – they can have a huge impact on the sound. You’ll likely find out your preferred combination, and it may well be that you find a sound that’s not otherwise obtainable. For example my personal favourite clipping combination is a germanium diode going one way, and a red LED going the other way – these have drastically different forward voltages, and so the resultant signal is very asymmetrically-clipped. As a sound it combines the louder, sharper edge of LED clipping with the more squishy, compressed character of germanium, and is pretty much always a cool addition to a build like a Big Muff.
Other simple tweaks are also much easier to do when you’re building the circuit from the ground up. Frequency response can often drastically adjusted with tweaks to just a few values in the tone stack if there is one, or the in-line filtering stages if there isn’t. The Big Muff is again a good example – don’t like the infamous midrange scoop? Change the values of a couple of resistors and capacitors, and you can flatten it out or give it a boost instead.
With all of these minor tweaks, it’s easy to put extra circuit controls on a switch for extra flexibility – I’ve built a couple of FZ-2 circuits, and found that I don’t always want an upper-octave sound – putting a switch that breaks the signal on one side of the rectification lets you toggle it, giving a whole new set of sounds to an already multi-mode circuit. The same goes for clipping diodes, tone stacks and extra circuits. For example, you can experiment with adding in a boost circuit before, after or even during the main effect signal path for extra punch and saturation.
And, of course, you have the all-important transistors – these are the beating heart of the fuzz sound – more often than not, all of the distortion in a fuzz comes from overloading a series of transistors far beyond their usual sonic limits. This means that finding unique, weird ones can lead to a totally unique and incredible sound. There is absolutely nothing wrong with the humble 2N5088, but the unpredictable, unstable nature of germanium is hard to replicate. And, for multi-transistor circuits, you can always take the hybrid approach to get the best of both worlds!
Should you never buy a fuzz again?
Image: Cristian Storto / Getty
Obviously, building your own fuzz pedals is great fun. But isn’t always the best option. The parts of the DIY world that are the most accessible tend to focus on what’s already been done, and at some point, it’s good to see what new ideas other builders bring to the table – maybe just to inspire your own playing, or maybe to give you a few ideas about your next fuzz pedal build.
Of course, there’s also the rabbit hole aspect of it all – like any hobby, building fuzzes can draw you in whirlpool deep alarmingly quickly – before you know it, you’ll have setup a search alert for an array of new-old-stock germanium transistors, your desk will be overwhelmed by half-populated PCBs and you’ll be dreaming about ideal bias voltages for your next build…
So, you may be just fine with accepting the sounds of an off-the-shelf pedal. But, guitarists have never really been able to be normal about effects, especially not fuzzes – why not join the ranks of many builders before you, and get tinkering?
See StewMac’s pedal-building resources here.
The post Are you better off building your own fuzz pedal? appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.
Source: www.guitar-bass.net
