Big Muff Output Stages? (Increasing Volume without changing the Pot)

[trad3mark]

Hello all,
I'm working on what i'm calling a "Hybrid Big Muff" build. I tried using buckets of germanium before, in the transistors and the diodes, but the lack of volume, gain etc was a disaster to balance out using things like the gain resistors between each stage etc etc blah blah... It was a mess. So i simplified things a bit. It's now silicon transistors, and germanium diodes. Very interesting results really! Still changed the gain resistors, but only from 8.2k to 7.6k, so it wasn't a massive jump. The mix of ge and silicon is where the hybrid thing came from. hahaha!

Anyway, i'm working on the output stage at the moment. I'm trying to get it to be a little louder, but without having to change the pot value to something bigger. I was looking at the various versions of it throughout the years (courtesy of GGG), and I haven't really been getting anywhere. Anyway, I cracked open my own one, the Big Muff with Tone and Wicker. Really interestingly is that a lot of the values right throughout the whole circuit are very different from the current USA model, or so i can see. Anyway, the output stage. The thing i'm most interested in is that the resistor going from +9V to the Q4 Base is a 470k. I was going with 390k all along. Is it that easy just to swap that resistor for a larger one to increase output, or will this muck about with the biasing of that transistor?

Also, I'm sure they're already about on the web, but is there any need for gut shots of the Tone Wicker?

[John Lyons]

Are you using an Audio taper now?
If so use a Linear taper.

You can make the emitter resistor
smaller to get a little more juice.