fuzz central's wah buffer

[fuzz-fanatic]

hey,

i have built this buffer for the mccoy wah i made from that very site and from some reason it still doesn't sound good before a wah pedal... i think i made the buffer right and even the trimmer changes the volume a little bit but it's not right. why there are two ground pads? maybe that got something to do with it not working well?

and maybe it's a related problem (and maybe not) in clean the wah sounds fantastic (got an inductor from arielfx.com) but in distortion it's much less audioable. maybe my transistors have gains which are too low? i have 350 in q1 and 326 in q2.

[Ben N]

Maybe I misunderstood your post, but if you have the buffer before the wah you have it wrong.  The idea is for it to go after the wah, between the pot and the out jack.

Ben

[fuzz-fanatic]

grrrr......... my mistake i ment fuzz pedal 

[Ben N]

Ahah, ok.  I'm not the guy to give you the technical lowdown, but it is pretty well known that vintage style transistor fuzzes generally don't like to follow buffers--they "want" to see the high output impedance of a pickup in order to sound right. So by adding a buffer to the wah you have fixed the problem of the wah not working at all, but now the fuzz sounds like crap.  Two solutions: move the fuzz ahead of the wah, if that sound works for you.  Or, try adding a pickup response simulator (http://www.muzique.com/lab/pickups.htm) to the buffer to have the best of both worlds.