Thursday 30 September 2010

Fuzz Face PNP - Tagboard

It's been a while since I've done a tagboard layout and this was a startling omission that someone requested.

Tuesday 21 September 2010

Catalinbread Merkin Fuzz

Info about the original:

The Catalinbread Merkin is a fuzz pedal that's just 'rite' for classic sixties fuzz sounds and beyond! Extended and refined from a classic fuzz circuit, this 3 silicon transistor circuit is very textural, varying from blunt to ripping. It's controls are simple, a volume, and a texture knob with huge range, from cleanish blend counter-clockwise to full fuzz as you turn the knob clockwise.

When developing the Merkin, we chose components for sweet yet buzzing tone which still has a very touch sensitive response. The Merkin is also very responsive to your guitar's volume and tone controls so you can spend less time stooped over your pedalboard, and more time actually playing. Along with a slew of sixties fuzz sounds from the Ventures to the Stooges and many points in between, The Merkin Fuzz is able to do octave-up sounds by using your guitar's neck pickup with the tone rolled off. It works great for bass too.

The life-blood of a fuzz is its power supply and the Merkin is no different. Use a carbon battery for warm vintage tone and smooth response. Use an alkaline or 9 volt dc supply for a harder sound, or run on 18 volt DC supply for even more output and an aggressive sound! Volume unity for the Merkin resides around 9:00, which means there's lots of boost on tap.





Updated 20/3/14.  A slightly more compact version:



Tuesday 14 September 2010

Clark Gainster




This pedal originally used large Russian Paper-in-Oil capacitors, and so this layout has been done to accommodate those large caps.  If you intend to use smaller caps, then the layout can be easily reduced in size and 3 or 4 of the links can be removed.