Help on getting best transistors for a BSIAB 2

[Its been said]

So I'm planning on building a BSIAB 2 from General Guitar Gadgets and while i have modded effects before this is the first time from scratch. It mentioned somewhere that all transistors are not created equal, so how do i ensure i get good ones? is GGG usually good about this or not? Should i order a bunch of duplicates from small bear and socket it?

any other general tips for building this circuit I'm pretty new to this and to here??

[Stellan]

One thing i have found out is that i usually always want to change the frequenzy responce to suit my rig and taste. For the BSIAB2 I did several mods before I was satisfied. (It rocks now!!) so use sockets for transistors and any caps and resistors you might want to tweak later (search for "BSIAB2 mod" to see some treads discussing what components are often substituted. ) I removed one of the Low Pass Filters in the end (c13 and c14) and changed the other cap plus changed c12 to gey a wider sweep of the tone control. Anyway, if you use sockets its easy to experiment.

[DWBH]

I just bought the transistors without experimenting. And it sounds killer!
Now, or I was very lucky with my transistors, or my bsiab sucks and I haven't realised it yet.

[plankspank]

It mentioned somewhere that all transistors are not created equal, so how do i ensure i get good ones? is GGG usually good about this or not? Should i order a bunch of duplicates from small bear and socket it?

Although JFETS are notorious on tolerances from device to device , they play a small part in this circuit design, so you should have no problems. In the first two stages, the top JFET acts as a constant current source to nullify this effect, and the last stage has a trimmer pot as a drain resistor to get around this problem. I've built similar circuits without sockets and without any problems.

[Stellan]

Yeah, I didn´t change the transistors, and mine sounds great! I still recomend sockets, because many seem to have had to tweak this circuit a little. Mine was useless with my rig before I modded the tone section.

[m-theory]

They do seem to matter in this circuit.  I've built about a half dozen of these.  All but the last one sounded terrific right away.  The last one sounded like butt.  A buddy of mine also has two of these that he built, and he had the same thing happen to both of his.  When the JFETs were swapped with different ones, they came to life.  It doesn't seem to be a very common issue, so it's probably only 1 or 2 positions that are the critical points, but it does indeed happen.