Angry Beard III -any good?

[brad]

I bought some low gain PNP germanium transistors from Small Bear a while back -big can, TI logo, gold leads, looks good!- and have been tryin' to find a use for 'em.  Does anyone know if the Angry Beard III is any good?  Was it a commercial pedal or a diy design?

Here's the schmo:  www.montagar.com/~patj/angrybd3.gif

The Small Bear transistors have gains under 50 and leakage under 300.

[RickL]

I built one of those a couple of years ago. If I remember correctly it was a pretty generic distortion, at least nothing struck me enough about it to have stayed in my mind. My suspicion is that you wouldn't notice the difference between a Si and a Ge transistor in that circuit. It's an easy enough build that it would we worth doing and socketing the transistor. If you don't hear any difference leave the Si in and use the Ge for something else.

If you're going to use the high/normal switch you might as well use a centre-off switch and give yourself three choices instead of two. Wire a 0.01uF cap in permanently and use the switch to add 0.01 and 0.22uF caps to give (almost) the original choices of 0.02 and 0.23uF plus 0.01uF.

I think I replaced the 1M feedback resistor in mine with a 1M pot in series with a resistor of some sort (470k maybe). You might also want to try switchable back-to-back diodes to ground immediately at the output of the op amp.