fuzzface on acid (here's a new problem)

[pinkjimiphoton]

so i pulled out my original face i made, figuring i loved the way the thing sounded, and pnp be damned.

so i open it up and realize wow, it's 8 ways more f'd up than a soup sandwich.... i don't even know how the thing coulda worked.

but enough of that... here's a new one. it's a pnp hybrid circuit, with presumably all the vegematic options i probably thought mattered a couple years ago. despite some problems, it sounds great. it shouldn't work at all. i moved the bias pot to an external pot so i could tweak it, and it had the 2k gain pot. other than that, the usual mods to make it louder.

in the q1 position, i have an mp25b (p looks like an n in russian i guess) and in q2, a 2n547. how this works is beyond me, but damn, it sounds good. when it works. that is, i believe an npn, right?

if ya dime the gain pot, it oscillates to the point of being unuseable. back it off some, and it makes a very chewy thick dynamic sweet fuzz

mind you, this abomination was one of the first things i ever built, so be gentle...

if you turn the guitar down all the way, you guessed it, motorboating. in a way it's kinda cool, cuz you can mess with the frequency from your guitar, and wayyyy down it's like a horrid tremolo'd fuzztone that is so horrid it's kinda groovy.

it's a pnp pedal, always was supposed to be, wired with a positive ground. i tried reversing this, it doesn't work as a negative ground.

i realize the problem is q2... but man, i'd love to figure out a way to keep the tone of this thing somehow close to what it is., i know i'll figure something out,
but it was such a dumb mistake and such an OPPOSITE of the pnp wired negative ground i figured some of ya would appreciate the humor of the situation.

epic facepalm

somehow i had this thing wired up with a charge pump AND a daughter board power supply filter before that and it was working... but here's the really weird thing... it would need to be plugged in with power and "on" for about 5 minutes before the led would light. then it would work great.

i shoulda left well enough alone lol....

so... any suggestions? or just bite the bullet and mess with q2 til i find something that sounds good and leave it the hell alone?

i removed all the extraneous crap.  now it only fires with - going to the ring, and positive going to ground.  this thing is on acid, but man, i'm having fun with it.

[ashcat_lt]

I've got nothing on the electronics aspect of this post, but I can tell you that the Russian alphabet is based on Greek, so their letter for the P sound is the same as the "pi symbol".  I guess that could be mistaken for a lowercase n...  The Cyrillic letter that actually looks like our P is the same as Greek rho, and makes the sound of our R, except they roll their Rs, which is why I couldn't ever speak Russian very well.  They do have a letter that looks like out N except backwards, but it's a vowel something like our Y, and makes the "ee" type sound.

[pinkjimiphoton]

lol... i just found it weird to get the oscillation problem... i don't remember it happening before... on a pnp circuit wired positive ground... wired with a negative ground, yes.,... but...

[garcho]

drop acid, then de-bug, you'll "find" it

just cut off the AC plug on your iron first...

Russian alphabet is based on Greek

The Russian alphabet is called Cyrillic, and it's actually "based" (basically, the exact same) on the Bulgarian alphabet, which in turn was based on the Greek alphabet, which was in turn based on the Semitic and Phoenician alphabets, which in turn were based on Hittite and Sumerian alphabets...

except they roll their Rs, which is why I couldn't ever speak Russian very well.

If that was the hardest thing about Russian I'd be working for the Kremlin by now

[hymenoptera]

BJT transistors will work reversed biased, except their Hfe will be highly nerfed...

You know, you may have stumbled upon the key to "low hfe" PNP parts in the future, as vintage parts begin to dry up. People might find good combos of otherwise high hfe parts which, when installed backwards, give up a whole new range of sounds to experiment with.

Or is this already common practice? I'm still pretty new to DIY guitar pedals in general.

[pinkjimiphoton]

BJT transistors will work reversed biased, except their Hfe will be highly nerfed...

You know, you may have stumbled upon the key to "low hfe" PNP parts in the future, as vintage parts begin to dry up. People might find good combos of otherwise high hfe parts which, when installed backwards, give up a whole new range of sounds to experiment with.

Or is this already common practice? I'm still pretty new to DIY guitar pedals in general.

lol... i do stuff like this all the time. sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn't, but it always leads me to something new and slightly different.
i am willing to smoke the occaisional part if i can find something worthwhile.
sometimes... you'll find some surprising things.

[duck_arse]

i am willing to smoke the occaisional part if i can find something worthwhile.

interesting phrasing, pjp.