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I think a 2N3904 is a little too low in gain for Q1, but a 2N4410 works nicely when you have something in the 300-500 range in Q2.
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That yielded the least sputtery note decay of any combination I tried. I settled on a Motorola BC109 with hFE of 175 in Q1 and a BC108B with hFE of 330 in Q2. My experience is that Q1 does best when its hFE is 150-250, and Q2 does best in the 250-500 range. People look at the part numbers and assume that Q1 should be the higher-gain part, but in fact the BC108C can have hFE as high as 800, while an older BC109 without a gain designation might easily end up in the 100-200 range. The original circuit specifies a BC109 in Q1 and a BC108C in Q2. The big knob in the center is still volume, but it also has controls for gain, tone, input resistance, and even voltage sag.
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After building the previous fuzz pedal, I now have my own set of preferences in this regard, implemented here (mainly to do with using small caps to recreate germanium transistor parasitic capacitances around silicon devices).īut I thought it would be nice to get all of the 1-knob variant sounds in one box, all tweakable from the front panel. When other companies copy it, they sub in their own component value tweaks, so they all sound a little different. The single knob is just a volume control, so it’s just a gnarly booster. It is itself just a Fuzz Face, with tweaks for higher-gain silicon transistors, and gain permanently set to max. The Colorsound 1-knob blue fuzz box is copied a lot.
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