It's december already!
From Dylan159's Unreleased circuits on FSB:
I'm not done with fuzz faces it seems. This one's goal is to keep all the classic cranked gain tones while making the ill-treated gain knob more useful. This is accomplished by moving the gain control to the first stage. When maxed, you have a classic, low input impedance, high gain fuzz face, because the emitter is effectively grounded. At low gain, the input impedance rises to something close to 200k or more, hopefully giving an interesting sound without the usual dulling that happens. Last but not least, this one doesn't need trimming! the emitter resistor assures predictable bias even with widely differing beta. You can still make it adjustable if you like to mess with it. Care has been taken to avoid blocking, since we're adding capacitors. With these values, blocking is roughly the same as with the original.
Update: Oops. There was a cut missing from the fuzz 3 + 100µ cap.. 8.12.2022, now fixed... and verified.
It's a pleasure to be featured here. This blog was where I started, as it was for many.
ReplyDeleteNice layout of course. Everyone can find updates on my latest creations on FSB and on my site https://bentfishbowl.wixsite.com/electronics.
Since I distribute my schematics with a share-alike CC license, does this make this one CC BY-NC-SA too? Not that it would be an issue anyway, doesn't get more DIY than vero layouts.
Looking forward to be featured here again!
I was thinking of doing sort of an advent calendar and drew up a few of your designs. Many of those are quite interesting and bring some fresh thinking on.
DeleteWell.. I figured i wouldn't mind the license, due to how we've been doing things here. But i guess you're right. That would mean placing credit and license on derivative work.
Sorry for not doing that. I'll take the post down tomorrow.
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Putting this back up. Post was reverted to a draft for a while..
DeleteI thought about this a bit over the past week or so. And no. CC BY-NC-SA on a schematic drawing does not make my orignal work CC BY-NC-SA.
Creative commons license is a copyright (or copyleft) which protects the work of an original author - in this case, it protects a schematic drawing posted on freestompboxes forum. Now, if i downloaded the drawing and opened it up in photoshop/gimp, made changes to drawn lines, text or symbols and posted it back up, then it would need to have the same CC license kept on that drawing with my changes, including mention of a source. Cropping a piece of this image and using it as a part of a new work would also need the same license attached to it.
However. Copyright on the drawing does not grant intellectual property ownership for the electronic concepts depicted on the drawing. If this was the case, the original author/owner of the CC license would basically own the topology of the circuit, including the parts that were not modded by the author. Copyright (or left) license does not do this. For owning a electronic topolygy or concept, one needs to have been granted a patent for that topology/concept.
Sure, drawing my layout was heavily inspired by a CC licensed orginal work posted on an internet forum. But so is a lot of music i've wirtten inspired by bands i've listened to. Neither have any of the copyrighted components of the orginal work used in the (questionably) derivative results. I think this isn't all that bad of a comparison. Copyright of musical work cannot include ownership of chords, drum beats etc.
For those not familiar with the subject. Creatice Commons (CC) is a copyright license that is designed to have original intellectual property ownership in tact, while still allow some free use of the original work for wide range of purposes as default - without the same requirements and restrictions when licensing work with more conventional, commercial copyright.
BY-NC-SA means:
BY (=attribution, needs mention of an original author)
NC (=non-commercial, cannot be used for commercial purposes without written permission)
SA (=share-alike, means all sharing and/or changes must carry the same license)
In this case, the layout i've drawn is a new, original work by me. However, it has attribution to the original schematic drawing author (Dylan159). It is non-commercial in sense that it is used here for fun and to be shared around. I post my layouts without specific copyright/left as they are free to use by anyone for what ever purpose they see fit.
Back in ~2010 I've released two albums by my band on CC license. I did a bit of reading on the subject back then.. This was quite fun to revisit some of that.
Does this make sense? Does someone disagree? I'd like to hear from you.
And if Dylan159 is seeing this - are you ok with me posting more of your circuits as my layouts? You are, or course, welcome to say so if you don't want your mods and designs featured here as my (or our) layouts. We will honor that wish.
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Hello mirosol. When the post was hidden I was left with no good way to contact you to ask about what happened, I was worried!
DeleteI never meant that my original license transferred to your work, but that if this fell under "derivative", which is a loose definition, it should be shared under the same license. You made a good point of you not being required to do that, but meant it at least as a suggestion for our common interest in a world of freely shared circuits.
Still, what I meant as " doesn't get more diy than this" is that I see no harm in you making layouts as your please here, instead I repeat how happy I am for it, I'm a fan of this blog. Are we still in time for the advent thing? I'm subscribed so I'll know if you post others.
Hi!
DeleteI left the comment up for only 24 hours before reverting the post. I hoped you'd see it, but it was quite short period of time. Sorry for that.
I felt i needed to take it down since i wasn't convinced keeping the post up was an ethical thing to do - before i thought it through.
Copyright and IP ownership is rarely a simple, staright-forward black-or-white situation. Even CC has it's downsides. For example, if a certain work was copyrighted with CC, it would still be copyrighted and owned by the copyright holder, and not by the "public". And hence not "free". On the other side of a coin, it's good to see something like GPL (which is rather close, but has different claws) used on a different kind of craft. On code, the license means that those software inventions must be kept free - owner doesn't matter all that much.
And that's (IMHO) the difference. On analog electronics the topologies are iherently free and humanity has gone to lenghts trying to keep it that way (of course, there are exceptions where some, arguably immoral and maybe even greedy, individual has been granted a patent for some basic building blocks).
I may be an naive fool, but i believe the electronic concepts and topologies will (or at least should) remain free. Even without free(ish) ownership that's based on being good.
And i'm glad that you are ok with us drawing layouts as they are with your shared schematic drawings. That's probably the biggest issue here. If you weren't, i would not post them.
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For the advent thing.. It was a quite tight fit to get all 24 done, even before i put the five layouts from Unreleased Circuits on hold (Those will be up one by one, soonish :)). There are a few others (LAL inspired, for example) in the works too, but i don't think i'll manage to get that much done before christmas.
I do believe there'll be enough builds for folks to try out on holidays, even if i could only churn out ~20 layouts in december :)
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Heh. I'm not sure what you're talking about. To me, it seems like you've put way more thought in to the circuits than about 90% of the boutique boxes by many commercial manufacturers we've featured here over the years. May it be that the base ideas and topologies have existed for decades, you've still managed to think them through and make quite fresh additions to basic topologies.
DeleteNearly everything "new" is usually built on top of what already exists. Make a little tweak to something to make it better to oneself. And if it's good, someone else usually comes along along and tweaks it further. I believe it's evolution. And i don't believe anything is ready or finished just yet.
My last word on the IP stuff for now: I think everyone would lose if analog electronics were patented or copyrighted. Component manufacturers and distributors would also suffer. And it would be a rare occasion where anyone would even try to build anything on top of existing designs. We'd have a lot less progress. Screw private ownership of ideas and morality (which varies wildly depending on culture, location etc).
I've got couple more of the smaller circuits coming along in the following weeks. I'll check out more what you've done. For example the envelope distorion is quite a novel idea and i'd like to draw that one up at some point.
We do have a few basic "rules" for layouts posted here. And in addition, i'm just a humble lackey and second in command. Mark is the captain around here (sorry for the star trek pun) :)
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Thanks a lot. While what you said is true, the "unreleased circuits" was me emptying the sack more than the peak of my efforts. Looking forward to the future.
DeleteJust finished this one and all I get is an oscillating click.. ?
ReplyDeleteSorry. My bad. There was a cut missing between fuzz 3 / negative side of 100µ and 470K feedback resistor. Try adding this cut and see if it spings to life?
DeleteLayout now fixed accordingly.
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Thanks man. It works great. I used 2N5088's and it sounds bad ass.
DeleteGreat! I'll tag it as verified.
Delete+m
Hi, please can you tell me what the pot types are? There is unhelpful confusion with US/Asia vs European codes. Log-Lin-RevLog are either A-B-C or B/C-A-F. So A might be Log or Lin; B might be Lin or Log; C might be RevLog or Log...
ReplyDeleteThanks.
I built this, I really like this fuzz. It's really responds to using different guitars. It doesn't clean up like a Fuzz Face exactly. It doesn't stay bright. I'm not exactly certain how the "self biasing" topology of these transistors is working, I need to sit down and look at this on a schematic side by side with a FF. I don't know how you could tweak this to get better clean up. It seems like maybe the finicky biasing is really essential to that interaction between the high impedance signal, resistance of the pot and the circuit.
ReplyDeleteI tried a ton of transistors in this. I ended up using 2n4401 and 2n5501. I tried a lot of mismatched pairs. 2n5088 sounds good but it's very high gain. With the transistors I used, I liked the attack. It's a little spongey, but still has definition. I wanted something that sounded a little nasty without being overly saturated. This does that. If the transistors are too mismatched, the circuit cannot compensate and they will sound misbiased.
Hi, I'm always up to some circuit analysis!
DeleteI've since collected this circuit and two similar ones in a post in my blog, where you can find schematics and comments https://bentfishbowl.wixsite.com/electronics/post/fuzz-face-variations
The idea is really simple: use emitter degeneration both to give a stable bias and as a more useful gain control. The original fuzz face is already somewhat self-biasing, but not nearly enough to make a difference and avoid trimming, unlike in this one.
re: cleanup. You aren't really supposed to use the volume control for "cleanup" as in the original; I mean, when fuzz is maxed you can because the circuit becomes almost identical to the 'face, but you should play with the gain control, since this tries to address the common complaint that it wasn't very useful in the original.
re: bias and transistor picking. I haven't specified transistors because I don't really think there's much to gain from testing, mixing and matching in a well behaved circuit: as long as the beta is within a normal range, bias should be what I expect. Have you tried measuring it? That would be the last word on it. Some transistors tend to oscillate, and that can produce sounds similar to misbias, even if the added 100p caps should prevent it.
Re: buffer. Yeah why not! Turning gain down increases input impedance and gain interaction, but the problem with a buffer before gain is always that you introduce noise unnecessarily. And once you reduce gain, input impedance in this goes up anyway, so there's less and less to gain.
I built this circuit and am enjoying it quite a bit. It sounds different but not bad with a buffer in front of it. I would recommend trying it. It sounds a bit smoother with a buffer in front of it. Some may even want to build this with buffered bypass. This pedal doesn't clean up quite like a FF so you aren't really losing out on anything if you do decide to add an input buffer.
ReplyDeleteI tried out a ton of transistors. I mismatched a bunch of pairs and that was interesting, you can get a lot of different sounds by mismatching transistors, but it sounds mis-biased if they're specs are too different. It sounds best with transistors of similar specs. You can really use anything as long as the pinout and hFE is relatively close, is what I found. In the end I used one 2n4401 and one 2n5551. It sounds pretty rad. It sounds super heavy, and extremely loud, but isn't overly harsh. I like it. Louder than my Fuzz Factory by far.