Looking for Fender Blender mod ideas

[digitalzombie]

I've got this circuit on the breadboard and I think it's good, but I want to make it even better and more usable. First up, full disclosure: I'm using 120K's in place of all the 150K's because that's the closest value I had on hand, so I'm sure some biasing is slightly off. If you think any of my specific asks would be alleviated by using the proper value PLEASE YELL AT ME. I'm also using all 2N5088's all just over 300HFE.

• I'm using the schematic from Fuzz Central. He writes about how "really loud" it is, but I don't think it's all that loud at all. Perhaps he's referring to when the tone bypass switch is on, but I don't want to bypass the tone circuit because I find it to be one of the most usable tone circuits I've heard. Is that last section at Q5 a booster, or just an output buffer? Any thoughts on what I can do to boost the fuzz level?
• My 'clean' signal coming from the blend isn't very clean at all. It's pretty gritty, actually. Is this the nature of the circuit, or do you think there's something mis-biased early on that's making this dirty?
• I read in another thread that during a repair a user discovered you could get very decent fuzz with no octave when there was no signal comping after the coupling cap off the collector of Q3. Can I just hook that up to a switch that will shunt the signal coming from the cathode of that cap to ground?
• When I was playing my Jaguar through it, the treble would make the fuzz super raspy. Turning my tone know all the way down resulted in a much sweeter sound from the fuzz, but my 'clean' signal was now very muddy. Can I/should I add a simple R-C low-pass in here? Maybe just after the coupling cap before Q3?

I think that's all for now. I've played quite a few octave fuzzes and this on is probably one of my favorite so far, and with a few tweaks I think could be my #1.

[antonis]

• I read in another thread that during a repair a user discovered you could get very decent fuzz with no octave when there was no signal comping after the coupling cap off the collector of Q3. Can I just hook that up to a switch that will shunt the signal coming from the cathode of that cap to ground?

You better "lift" lower diode (the one goes to Q3 Emitter) anode via a on-off switch..
(break connection with Q4 Base..)

[Rob Strand]

In the past someone suggested adding an 8.2k resistor in series with the 10uF cap on the emitter of the phase splitter.   This matches the emitter output impedance to the collector output impedance for better balancing.   You could even try a pot there.