Fuzz Face/Big Muff hybrid?

[letsgocoyote]

Has anyone before designed a circuit that mixes a fuzz face and a big muff?  Just curious.

I just breadboarded something like this.  Removed the clipping sections from the big muff circuit and stuck in a fuzz face type circuit.  so buffer/sustain > fuzz face > tone control/recovery stage.

seems to work pretty good, I will be building it later tonight (my bro-in-law wanted me to build him a fuzz), just curious if this has been done before!

[rackham]

I stuck both circuits in the same box for my bandmate - a nasty cheap sounding FF (his request) and an op-amp Muff.

The signal went in that order too, sounds pretty hefty with both going at once.

[tcobretti]

That is a pretty cool idea.  There are many pedals that incorporate thew BMP tone stack, but I have never seen one that works in the buffer as well.  I would think that you'd need to use very low gain transistors to make it work right.  You might also want to lower the feedback resistor to something between 30k-70k to control the overall amount of fuzz.

My Mondo Fuzz is a essentially a high gain FF followed by a BMP tone stack.  I changed the tone stack values, but if you fed in BMP values it woule be very BMP-like. 

[petemoore]

Has anyone before designed a circuit that mixes a fuzz face and a big muff?
  Oh sure !
  And the Blackface stage, and every booster I've been known to build, plus the electra and Joe Davissons and Gus Smalley's 1 transistor and 1transistor boost +diode distortions.
  Also the gained down FF into the FF.
  Now it's the ff, or FF, or ff+FF into the Minibooster [ie I have a signal chain: ff > FF > Minibooster with pregain and tone controls which gives lots of gain up and down adjustment knobs [the two which I adjust the most are on the guitar] and switches.
  FF into TC ? has trouble driving a passive tone control, doesn't really work right.
  after that it's getting away from being fuzz face...to a nice place, but not really a fuzz face.
 

[tcobretti]

Pete, I had read for a couple of years that you can't push a BMP tone control without a transistor stage to bring the volume back up, but the Mondo is plenty loud, and the tone stack works great.  I'm not smart enough to know why it works, but it goes to show that the 'rules' don't always apply.

You should try it - I bet you'd like the Mondo.  At one end of the tone knob it's very Orpheum sounding, and at the other it is classic FF.

[PurpleStrat]

I add a muff tone stack to everything. It did not sound "right" to me on a FF though. Also Tonefactor sells one. The Huckleberry.

[Ben N]

Sticking a booster in front of a fuzz face has been done a lot, in various ways--check out Joe Gagans various designs using this basic topology. The BMP back, though, that is interesting.

[Gila_Crisis]

the mondo fuzz reminds me the wooly mammoth, which is basically the same, a fuzz face with BMP-like tone control

[letsgocoyote]

ill have to draw up my breadboarded schematic.  it's nothing revolutionary i suppose, just cut and paste type deal, but still fun

[John Lyons]

Pete, I had read for a couple of years that you can't push a BMP tone control without a transistor stage to bring the volume back up, but the Mondo is plenty loud, and the tone stack works great.  I'm not smart enough to know why it works, but it goes to show that the 'rules' don't always apply.

Travis
The reason you are getting good volume through the BM tone section is because you have switched the voltage divider off Q2's collector from the usual FF values.
With 1K at the collector, 10K from 9v and out taken from the juction of them you get a lot more volume output than the usual FF with 8k2/390R.

John

[letsgocoyote]

Here's the schematic as it has been breadboarded!

[tcobretti]

Pete, I had read for a couple of years that you can't push a BMP tone control without a transistor stage to bring the volume back up, but the Mondo is plenty loud, and the tone stack works great.  I'm not smart enough to know why it works, but it goes to show that the 'rules' don't always apply.

Travis
The reason you are getting good volume through the BM tone section is because you have switched the voltage divider off Q2's collector from the usual FF values.
With 1K at the collector, 10K from 9v and out taken from the juction of them you get a lot more volume output than the usual FF with 8k2/390R.

John

Changing those values did make the basic FF much louder, so it makes sense that they would push the TS harder.

In regard to the Wooly Mammoth, the really good part of it is the Pinch knob.  Without a little Pinch it's a fairly generic Si FF, but with the Pinch it is very nice indeed.

That schem looks pretty good.  You should post some clips.

[jayp5150]

Sound clips would be sweet.

I'm curious about the omission of the bypass cap around the 1.1k in the FF section.

Was that one of those "let's see what happens" things, or is there a solid reasoning behind it?

i.e: does the BMP tone stack kinda defeat the need of the bypass cap?

[letsgocoyote]

my knowledge of pedal design is more art than science, so i know crapall about the bypass cap... but I figured that since I am not using the fuzz face method of controlling fuzz and jsut keeping it at a fixed value it doesnt matter?  since im jsut using the voltage divider sustain control off the BMP input stage

[John Lyons]

The Bypass cap at the typical FF "fuzz" control has everything to do with the amound of fuzz and frequency responce.
Bigger cap = more frequencies/lower boosted (10uf- 47uf etc) .
Smaller cap will boost higher frequencies (.22 -1uf etc)
Without a cap there there is not much boost although the transistor still amplifies a good bit.

john

[tcobretti]

What I think is interesting about this hybrid circuit is that the first stage will push the FF enough that badly misbiased transistors may still work.  It would be really interesting to play with pots on the collector resistors of the FF as well as possibly a 1M or 750k pot in place of the feedback resistor.

You might be able to make some ungodly nasty sounds by playing with the FF bias.

[bumblebee]

another good one is a LPB>moded FF> BMP tone stack.

[ambulancevoice]

what about omega>>>modded ff>>>bm ts???

[tcobretti]

I think the Omga would be not so great.  When you use a smaller value for the the input cap on a FF you lose much of the actual fuzz and it turns into an overdrive/distortion.  So maybe if you made the Omega into a full-range booster...

[John Lyons]

The Omega is a full range booster. Well...and a treble booster.... er, It's variable via the range pot.

john