Civil War Big Muff fuzz problems

[OiMcCoy]

Oh I am all for the silliness.

I will for sure try that. I am also going to play with the diodes. Thinking LEDs might give me the bite I am looking for. Right now its very creamy. Especially with the mid controls.

[Fancy Lime]

Yeah, uhm, sorry 'bout that! Lesson: check your spelling, there's some real dill weeds on the loose

On a more serious note: try also to use different caps on the diodes in the two stages. For example a smaller cap with Si diodes in the first stage and a large cap with LEDs in the second. This let's you fine-tune the low-frequency clipping and overall low end. Lots of fun to be had with experimenting here.

Cheers,
Andy

[Phend]

Cool,

. I am also going to play with the diodes

[OiMcCoy]

So I have had the chance to play around with it some more. Right now I am extremely pleased with it. The only issue I have is that the low end can get a little farty on my bass. But that's not exactly unexpected. I am going to keep playing with some different values and see if I can
tighten it up a little.

A few great things, the tone stack with a mid control sounds great. It is 100% usable. Both the tone and mids. It really opens up the versatility of the circuit. The other thing is that it has a lot of volume on tap. Way more than that other big muffs I have had in the past.

[iainpunk]

if you want a 'tighter' sound, you can decrease the capacitor value coming off of the first transistor, going to the 'sustain' control, this leaves out some bass and tightens the character up a lot.

cheers

[OiMcCoy]

So after tinkering for a bit and coming up with something that really works well for my bass, I decided to try out my new Tele with it and was shocked to find how little gain it has compared to a normal Muff. So my first instinct was to think I failed at my goal. But then I played around with it some more, then bypassed it and heard how shitty my guitar tone was. But once I switched it back on I started using it as a preamp type pedal. And I got to say, it sounds pretty remarkable in this roll. I can still get some fuzz out of it at max setting, but the main draw for me is the mid control gives the circuit such a lush tone for my not so lush ceramic pickups.

Now my question is how do I keep this goodness that I discovered while increasing the gain a little? Should I make the first boost circuit hotter, or the clipping circuits? Or do I just throw another boost in front?

[iainpunk]

So after tinkering for a bit and coming up with something that really works well for my bass, I decided to try out my new Tele with it and was shocked to find how little gain it has compared to a normal Muff. So my first instinct was to think I failed at my goal. But then I played around with it some more, then bypassed it and heard how shitty my guitar tone was. But once I switched it back on I started using it as a preamp type pedal. And I got to say, it sounds pretty remarkable in this roll. I can still get some fuzz out of it at max setting, but the main draw for me is the mid control gives the circuit such a lush tone for my not so lush ceramic pickups.

Now my question is how do I keep this goodness that I discovered while increasing the gain a little? Should I make the first boost circuit hotter, or the clipping circuits? Or do I just throw another boost in front?

i'd say build another boost (or a few) to boost in to the modded muff, that gives a bunch of flavours of drive

cheers

[antonis]

Big Muff is a pedal of more than 40dB gain so I think you have to play with HPFs corner frequency rather than boosting it more..

P.S.
Unless you have some ultra clean transparent boost builds in mind..

[OiMcCoy]

Big Muff is a pedal of more than 40dB gain so I think you have to play with HPFs corner frequency rather than boosting it more..

P.S.
Unless you have some ultra clean transparent boost builds in mind..

Can you break this one down for me layman mind?

Are you talking about the bias?

If it helps I am using 5088's for all four stages.

[antonis]

More boost means more distortion (in an already high gain circuit..)

There are plenty of high-pass filters to play with..

[OiMcCoy]

Where would I want to put a HPF?

[antonis]

Big Muff already has 5 HPFs (one for each of 4 gain stages and another one on Tone control) so you don't have to put an additional one..

P.S.
We might are talking for different cases so if you wish to boost Big Muff simply put an electro cap (10μF to 47μF - the bigger the cap value the more the bass amplified) in parallel with last recovery stage transistor Emitter resistor..