Back to Bazzics - Bazz Fuss and Buffers

[Bishop Vogue]

Hemmo's design says you can skip skip the transformer if the Bazz Fuss is not preceded by a buffered pedal.  I recently built the Klon Buffer and decided to test it with the Bazz Fuss (my first build.  Ah the memories...) and ... there were no problems using the buffer before (or after) the Bazz Fuss.  When I run the Fuss into a Tubescreamer, something horrible happens to the tone.  Not sure why that is though and it makes me a little wary of selling the bazz fuss.  Anybody know why simple fuzz circuits can sound really really bad when they feed into another gain stage (have noticed this tone suck with other distortion pedals, too)?  (Tubescreamer before Bazz Fuss is actually really good sounding, oddly.)

http://revolutiondeux.blogspot.ca/2012/03/hemmotim-escobedo-bazz-fuss.html

[GibsonGM]

I've noticed it too... very common, Bishop.

I think you have a couple of things going on:   you are sending an already-distorted signal at a higher than guitar output voltage into a pedal that expects to see <1 volt input.  This causes the thing to clip right from the starting line.  Not in a good way, either. 

You have some 'not guitar' output impedance working with the TS input impedance, and modifying what the designers tried to do in terms of tone shaping.

You've already shaped the tone to what you want with the Fuss, and taken away a lot of the original signal, plus generated a lot of other harmonics...so the signal is nothing like what the TS designers were working with.  When this hits the tone shaping components of the TS, it basically sounds like junk. 

This is the basic gist of it, altho yes, it's a little more complex internally.  These factors and more work 'together' to destroy a formerly nice tone, ha ha.