Axis Face R3 Question...........

[guitar_199]

I am about to build one of these and a question popped into my mind.  I wonder if those of you familiar with the pedal would mind giving your thoughts........

The smoothness pot.

Once you set that......do you really wind up adjusting it a lot?   Or is it more a thing that, once you get it set sweetly the way you like it.... you just leave it alone.

I was just wondering about the idea of doing that with a trimmer....set it once...and then avoid the urge to play with it.

In advance, I appreciate any thoughts and opinions......

Bob

[mojotron]

Sorry folks for the long post, but I was pretty excited when I got a kind of "Boutique Axis Face frankenstein thing" done - which is a Axis Face with some tweaks I explain below, this is the best FF I have built yet.

What I did, which I really really liked, was to take the GGG Boutique Fuzz layout and sub in the values of the components from the Axis Face Si Rev. 3 from Fuzz Central. This requires some in interesting bridges to bridge the Q2 Base-Collector bypass (with a 100pF Silver Mica cap) and bridging the 220Ohm resistor and 1K contour pot (with a .047uF poly cap). But you can edit the layout to make this easier.

Oh ya, I also used a .1uF output cap. The base loading is not a problem with the Axis Face's 15uF bypass cap on the Q2 emitter resistor - so the degenerative feedback to Q2 emitter as well as Q1 base has more base - thus, you get less base (and the associated current) out of both Q1 and Q2... Yikes! Well, to make a long story short - I like a .1uF ouput cap and a 100kA ouput pot.

About the smoothness pot... I used a 50KA pot, and I use it all the time for a couple of reasons:
1) If I want a killer dirty boost, I set the fuzz to 60-70% and the smoothness (a.k.a bias in the GGG schematic) pot to 50%. On the Axis Face - overlayed on the GGG Boutique Fuzz circuit - this sounnd is just outstanding!
2) With a strat - I never used the smoothness/bias and contour pots. But, I really like to plug in humbucker guitars into FFs as well. With a Les Paul I use the smoothness pot at 40-60% and with a 335 I use the smoothness pot at about 20%. This gives you the best of both worlds. And, for what it's worth - this is where the contour pot on the GGG circuit is marginally useful.

One more thing. I mentioned above that I use a .1uF output cap (vs. the .01uF specified in Phillip's schematic) so that when I just want a little fuzz the sound is increadably sweet sounding with a neck pickup - preferably a strat with a fat 50's neck... However, I have built a lot of Ge FFs and thought that - since the Axis Face did indeed sound very Ge FF like - I would keep tweeking the circuit until it sounded exactly like my '69 clone (which by the way my Ge FF uses an NTE102 for Q1 and a NTE102A for Q2) and I ended up with the following tweaks to the Fuzz Central schematic.

1) Transistors: So for the Axis Face Rev. 3 I used a PN2963 for Q1 (a must) and a 2N5088 for Q2. I'm not 100% sure I will stick with the 2N5088 in Q2 - it almost requires a 2K emiter pot (but I like it for now with the standard 1k emitter pot). If you use the PN2963/2N5088 combo you don't need to measure hfe on them to do sorting... But if you already have them sorted you could try the highest PN2963 in Q2 and lowest in Q1. This was a different kind of sound, but amost as good as the PN2963/2N5088 combo.

2) The .047uF cap that bypasses the 1k2 resistor. I actually use a 1kB pot in series with a 220 Ohm resistor, and I found that the .047uF cap actually shunts too much high end - giving less high end from the circuit for my ears - when compared to the '69 clone. So, I used a series of caps to replace the .047uF cap until I got it dead on First I used a .033uF, then a .022uF cap - I finally settled on a .015uF PF2A153K Xicon Poly film cap - now the "Boutique Axis Face frankenstein thing" I built is exactly like my Ge '69 clone.

Sorry for the long post, I would really like to get other's observations on this.

[mojotron]

Sorry 2x post

[phillip]

I really like to adjust the Smooth pot on the Axis Face.  It's quite useful to nail a lot of different fuzz tones, especially if you like to mess with different settings on the Attack control.

Enjoy the circuit

Phillip

[guitar_199]

Phillip....

Thank you very much for the response... I am certain that I will do JUST that!!!!

Bob