LastGasp Art Laboratories Octavella

 It's christmas day! So it's time for another noisy octave thingy in style of LAL!

Smart People Factory Red Threat V2

Happy holidays! We hope you have a good one! ...and there's number of unverified layouts for you to try out this holiday season! Like this one..

Dylan 159's Blendy Buffoon

Next up from Dylan159's Unreleased Circuits is the Blendy Buffoon. We've had a bunch of different blend/mix/loop designs up already, but this idea was still missing. Some may have stumbled upon an issue where you couldn't use a basic blend circuit with the likes of Marshall Bluesbreaker or MXR Dynacomp. That issue is due to those pedals (and loads of others) reversing the phase. Which resulted in minimal signal output as the dry signal is 180 degrees out of phase with the wet signal. Now this one cures this behavior - and you can flip the switch to use this with any pedals in the loop - may it be reversing the phase or not. I believe this may come in handy on various situations, like recording.

Dylan159's Troupple Boost

I'll be posting a few circuits from Dylan159's Unreleased Ciruits. There was the Fuzz Facelift posted earlier and i'll continue with more of these goodies. Next up:

Troupple boost. Gamers might get the reference. This came out from my wish for a simple, clean treble boost that could work from a variety of supply voltages to be even cleaner. The rangemaster's bias varies wildly to the point that barely works at 18v. This one features the same bass cutoff and the same input impedance, resulting in that small resonant peak and treble damping. You can try a 10n cap for a more tube screamer-like response.

Danelectro Fab Overdrive

Someone mentioned that the circuit in an earlier post would have possibly been an inspiration for this one. Not sure if i share the sentiment, since that 80's japanese design and this have basically, or in quite broad terms, just the gain pot method in common with each other.

Anyway. Quite a few people seem to lke this ultra-cheap OD. And what's not to like. There's a nice, loud clipping amp followed by tuned TS-style tone control. Not that complicated, but sure does sound nice.

Vesta Fire / Reagun / Nadine's Overdrive

Second post for today is the Overdrive from Manfred's trace (at FSB). This comes from the same series as it's distortion brother (see the earlier Vesta Fire Distortion post), but the design is slightly more obscure. Still, the inverting input filter path to ground gain pot method on a non-inverting gain stage is used. However, the clipping isn't your bog standard feedback loop diodes. The original diodes in series with 10K resistor are something that hasn't been identified (at least not yet), so i figured this would be a nice board to try on your stash of non-conventional diodes. Maybe some zeners? I'm fairly certain this circuit won't sound bad, no matter what diodes you put in there...

Vesta Fire / Reagun / Nadine's Distortion

Not that long ago, Manfred traced his Reagun Distortion unit and posted the results on FSB. These pedals were sold as Vesta Fire, Nadine's and Reagun brands around early to mid-eighties. All these were made by Shiino Vesta Fire Corporation (SVFC), which became Vestax back in 1987.

Designwise these are not bad at all. This one reminds me of OD250 with BMP style tone stack and a decent inverting amplifier as a recovery stage. Might be worth to try out. Sadly, i couldn't find any demos...

Exar MM-04 Moon Metal

 Next up from Vitalii's traces is Moon Metal from later Exar series. Youtube demo found isn't all that great, but there's very nice EQ section and gain range seems quite good as well. Not a small circuit, but i think this could be quite usable.

DNA Analogic Smoky Fuzz

 Traced on FSB by Asbestosaurus, this circuit looks at a first glance a bit like OD250/Dist+, but no. And the Sense control makes this quite interesting. I built my layout version one, but this is redrawn to make it better.. Anyway, nice to see something cool done to a single opamp drive topology.

Caline CP-29 White Heat

 Boost with grit. Basic, but not exactly like all the others out there.

Biyang Tonefancier BL-8 Blue

 This one is kind of a take on a single opamp overdrive with hard clippers ala OD250/Dist+, but the gain control is placed on the feedback loop like in many standard overdrive designs. Nothing too speacial or different, but a nice addition to overdrive palette nevertheless. Snippet from the spiel:
The BL-8 delivers a creamy yet clear overdrive the sounds like the old tube amps of the 70's. Highly recommended for those who play Blues and Country music.

Exar HR-03 Hammer

 Another one from Vitalii's traces. This one seems quite nice modern metal distortion with reasonable frequency characteristics. Should be enough gain too. The 47K at the top (horizontal one) may be a point to tweak for even more over the top gain. Like so many of these pedals of Polish origin, this one seems to have no demos available either..

Sarno Earth Drive

 Traced by GratefulEight, this overdrive seems like a circuit worth to try out.

From the source: The Earth Drive is the ultimate boost/overdrive pedal, designed to retain your instrument's natural character while providing an organic, full-bodied, yet transparent sound.

Use the Earth Drive as a clean boost to add warmth and smoothing, or turn up the drive knob and get a wide spectrum of overdrive harmonics and singing sustain. The Earth Drive has a huge range of boost control with its volume knob, while the tone knob helps you perfectly dial in the treble response.

Whether you play bass, pedal-steel, electric piano, electric guitar, organ, whatever, the Earth Drive is quite possibly the most useful and versatile drive pedal you've ever heard.

Exar DS-02 Distortion

 VitaliiBobrov is doing an amazing job in tracing Exar pedals. This Polish brand has some decent tones and lots of room for tweaking and trying things out. Once again, try to tweak the values at the inverting input to ground. And try on a different pair of diodes for clippers, etc.

No demos around for this one either...

Lastgasp Art Laboratories Green Monster Septic Fuzz

 Found this circuit from the DEFX files and thought this to be quite interesting. Discontinued circuit with noise for days. From the source:

The GREEN MONSTER septic fuzz (GM2)is an effect
pedal to create a septic distortion.

Characterized by a dirty, broken and rotten sound. Bad handling!

GREEN MONSTER is back with four knobs! There is an easy to use sound which the first GREEN MONSTER (ultra fuzz) was never able to create, but the sound is still putrifying! Genuine septic sound can be found here!

First one is close to the original...

 

 ...and the latter is with DEFX mods - adding a gain switch for stock and other...
 

Joyo Roll Boost

Nice, small and has room for tweaking - i just love to do these modern, super cheap china circuits.. Layout is according to fsb-trace by CheapPedaCollector - who does amazing job with pedals like this one.

 

 

Dylan159's Fuzz Facelift

 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.

Exar MT-1 Metal

Hi yall. Noticed a week or so back that it's been exactly ten years since my first post here. To celebrate the occasion, i thought i'd post something. There's been a number of slower years along the way, but so it goes. Life has it's ups and downs. To quote one of the more interesting british bands i've found in recent years: "It's alright now. Not what you hoped for, but that's ok. Teenage hopes are never less than perfect anyway."

Now for the layout. There had been a trace up on FSB for years and it seemed a bit wonky on couple of details. Vitalii checked his unit out and there were a couple of errors on that old trace. His new trace seems to be spot on. Now, this probably won't be the low-parts-count / easy build alternative for HM-2 style sounds, but this may still be nice 1590B-sized build with enough distorion. There's also room for tweaking. For examble, one could sub one or even both clipping diode pairs for LEDs or Schottkys or use a on/off/on switch for changing them on the fly. Hi/Lo gyrator controls seem to be quite effective as well. I bet this will be a fun distortion build with no special parts required.

Sadly, no youtube demos to be found.. Should you build one of these and a make a demo? ...So i could post it up?

Barber Electronics Edge Hog Distortion

 Another damn nice trace that's up on FSB, by Joe from Grey Bench Electronics. This one seems to be a very limited run distortion from Barber, built around the time of the millennium madness.

Stafford Maxon Hizbender 1944T

 There was a great post from Grey Bench on FSB, tracing this ten year old Stafford Maxon circuit that i found interesting back in a day, but couldn't source a schematic back then. This is per original, using only a half of a dual opamp and utilizing a 12x21 board.

YACK YF-2 Fuzz

George Giblet did a trace (and some guesswork on the cap values) on FSB a few years back. The cap values might not be 100% per original, but according to George, those should be at least close enough. There are a few ideas on this late 60's circuit that are not present on every single FF/TB-clone out there, so i thought this migh be nice and fun little circuit to try out. Not sure if i built one back when this was drawn. Seems i can't remenber everything that went on in 2019. Seems so long ago now.

However. This might be fun to build and to tweak to your liking. Note the transistor pinouts as those match 2SC828s. Parallel polarity protection is in place etc. I'm fairly certain you'll get this sounding good with modern values for resistors as well.

DOD FX70C Corrosion

 From America's Pedal:
DOD introduced the Corrosion distortion pedal (FX70C) in mid-1997. With basically the same circuit as the FX70 Metal X, the Corrosion featured a heavily oxidized metal finish and no paint except red (1997-98) or black (1999) graphics near the control knobs; the first version with red graphics appears to have been more rare. In 1999 the final version with black graphics was introduced, with the model name in a two-tone box to match the appearance of the final series of DOD pedals. However, the Corrosion did not use the same casing or switch, and may have been revived to profitably use up the last remaining second-series parts. It is unclear if either version of the Corrosion was ever featured in DOD advertising or catalogs, but because of its raw, unfinished appearance, sales were probably slower than the Metal X. The Corrosion was discontinued when production of all FX-series pedals officially shifted to China in late 1999.

 

Exar OD-02 Overdrive

 Recently traced at FSB by VitaliiBobrov, i find this very interesting. Discrete opamp overdrive, that leaves a lot of room for tweaking and modding. Sounds pretty great even as it is.

There are never too many discrete opamp designs... 

/edit - There was an error on the gain pot label. That's now fixed. Also, the telpod-brand pots on the origal unit use A for linear and B for log tapers. So you should use log pots for gain and tone. Anyway. This is verified.

Simble by Mad Professor

 This should probably be up here as well.. Spiel:

Simble Overdrive has a natural organic tone, unsurpassable touch sensitivity, sweet tube-like compression and built in inspiration. This natural sounding pedal works as a clean boost, ”on the edge” crunch, or a sweet singing overdrive, always retaining the tone of your prized guitar.

The Simble pedal is happy with either single coil pickups or humbuckers and thanks to the pedals wide bandwidth also works great with bass!

Earthquaker Hizumitas

 From the source:

The Hizumitas was designed for the one and only guitar sorceress, Wata, from the legendary band, Boris! We could not be more excited to have the honor of working with such an iconic legend known for her crushing riffs and mind-melting leads. The Hizumitas is a faithful sonic recreation of her go-to distortion which has been a staple of her tone for many years: the Elk BM Sustainar.

Despite the claims it's not a 1:1 clone of the original, as there are some changes, but who doesn't love a BMP variant. The only change from the schematic is I included a polarity protection diode and 100uF filtering cap in place of a 100r resistor from +9V to the power rail. If you want to include it swap out D3 for a standing 100r resistor. Build on fellow followers of the fuzz.

Stock:

With added Mid Switch:

Catalinbread Karma Suture

Catalinbread has released two versions of the Karma Suture, one germanium and one silicon based. Both at their hearts are simply a modified Harmonic Percolator. I think Catalinbread described it best on their site:

A bubbling cauldron of even-order harmonics!

The only change I made in the layout from the schematic is I added a 100uF cap from power to ground to assist in power filtering. Schematic can be found here. Enjoy my fellow fuzzheads.

Catalinbread Karma Suture (Ge)

 

 

Catalinbread Karma Suture (Si) 

FAL Treble Boosters

 Found these posted by the one and only pinkjimiphoton on the usual places. Both are very old and rare always on fixed treble boosters. Should be quick fun small builds. You can easily make them NPN by flipping the electrolytic caps, power and ground connections. I believe low gain transistors will work fine in them.

FAL Treble Booster 1967

FAL Treble Booster 1969

Monster Effects Mastortion

I know, I know, it's been a long time since a new layout has been posted. We have not gone away, just time has a habit of getting away from you, especially with the current state of the pandemic. I've got a running list for more layouts to come, but I don't want to post them all too quickly. I hope everyone is staying safe and healthy.

I want to start the year out with a new layout. This is one I've had waiting in the wings for awhile and finally had time to site and make a layout for it, so without further adieu. 

 The Monster Effects Mastortion was originally a limited edition pedal designed with Brent Hinds of Mastodon as a heavy OD/Distortion that's on the verge of fuzz. Not much info on it, as it was originally made in very low numbers. It's basically YATS with a set tonestack. The only changes I made was to the power section as the original has an interesting setup with bridge rectifiers and I don't feel it's necessary or adds anything to the pedal. Schematic can be found here.