Fuzz Face Reissue--new transistors--any suggestions?

[NBreidenbaugh]

Greetings!

I have a Dunlop FF reissue and it sounds, well, mediocre at best. I want to replace the transistors. Any suggestions as to which ones would make this thing sound better? I'd thought about a lower-gain device in the first stage like an OC44 or somesuch...

Thanks,
Nate

[CynicalMan]

Check out the small bear Fuzz Face transistor sets.

What about it don't you like?

[theehman]

+1 on Small Bear.  He'll send you a good matched pair with the resistor values to use for proper biasing.

[smallbearelec]

Take a look at my tutorial on breadboarding a Fuzz Face:

http://www.smallbearelec.com/HowTos/BreadboardSiFF/BreadboardSiFF.htm

You are not concerned with the breadboarding, but with my notes on Why a silicon FF sounds either lifeless or harsh because of poor choice of transistors or failure to bias correctly. The Dunlop reissue circuit is similar enough to what I show in the article that my suggestions for tweaking will work. You can use silicon devices to start (cheap!) and try germanium if you want to hear what that sounds like.

Regards
SD

[joegagan]

pre 99 boards are quite easy to make sound good. you can tell the pre 99s, they are the traditional size PCB mounted on two cast bosses. the post 99 style are attached to the dpdt and have extra junk that i have found tricky to make sound good.

pre 99, put a 25k trimpot in place of the 8.2k resistor, coupla nice transistors ( 2n3906 for q1 works great, Ge in q2 ) dial up 4.5 v on the collecotr of q2, voila!

[petemoore]

  Essentially Joe is right. Not too difficult to set up a fine FF circuit which can be plugged into...some input.
 ''Not with this amp'' was the consensus when I used to try out FF's on my buddies amps. That vibe curtailed such activities, a bitter waste of noise-time in our experience, my buddy feared amp damage etc.
 That said, I'm not claiming it can't be done or it isn't worth it, just that IOLE we had better mileage with other options than plug FF in...uh...'here'.
 I've had pedals that sat around for year[s. Tried under new set of circumstances a TB once unleashed tricks it didn't know it was capable of.
 As always w/FF type circuits, don't forget the volume controls, particularly all of them [fuzz, amp, guitar] but rolling back the guitar volume for the inbetween oversaturated or harsh or squashing settings, if it's all set up to be able to, and does that to smaller cleans without gating.
 A thousand variables, the basic set up is easy, though the circuit can be prohibitevly finnicky at times, other times can do all the tricks, given the right 'setting'.

[LucifersTrip]

Have you tried adjusting the bias first?

[NBreidenbaugh]

It's the gated quality that I don't like. This only goes away with the fuzz control turned all the way up, and the volume control on my guitar turned most of the way up.

LucifersTrip: No I have not adjusted the bias first--and thankfully (for these purposes, anyway) it is a post 1999 FF, so there is a bias trimpot thoughtfully provided for each of the Transistors! Having read the article posted by SmallBear, I think I'll tweak before I desolder. Thanks, guys and girls. I'll let you know how it goes!

[CynicalMan]

That sounds exactly like a bias problem. Tweak away.