Basic Audio Orpheum Fuzz

[cjonesplay]

Been looking all night for a schematic for the Basic Audio Orpheum Fuzz, but can't even get gutshots. Anyone got this pedal and want to decipher it? Based on what I can tell from the Spooky Tooth, the circuit is loosely based on the Fuzzrite, but a third transistor is added and the texture knob shifts between Q1 and Q2 for different flavors of saturation. I would love to figure out how to apply this to more designs, but I can't quite understand how it works. Too much for my tired mind:)

[nocentelli]

cjonesplay wrote

 the circuit is loosely based on the Fuzzrite, but a third transistor is added and the texture knob shifts between Q1 and Q2 for different flavors of saturation.

The fuzz pot on the original fuzzrite (and original opheum) does as you describe, i.e. pans the output between Q1 and Q2, giving a woolly overdrive at minimum, a screaming fuzz at maximum, and a variety of out-of-phase graunchyness in between the extremes. The catalinbread merkin is a reworked/modernised fuzzrite with an extra Q3 for level boost - pretty sure there must be a vero layout for it here at gfx already.

Seppuku took the idea to extremes and their fuzz overloader has Q1 output blended with the output of Q1->Q2->Q3->Q4, i.e. four series stages of overloaded filth at the extreme end of the pot and is reputedly quite noisy (I breadboarded it a while back, but don't remember it being unusable). There is a layout here for  the overloader:
http://tagboardeffects.blogspot.com/2016/02/seppuku-fuzz-overloader.html?m=1

If you just used three stages, the pot would move from clean-ish to filthy but without the phase artifacts.

Merkin:


OG fuzzrite:


OG orpheum:

[cjonesplay]

Thanks, it’s that third stage that I need to take a good look at. I built the old Orpheum last night and it sounds great, I just need to breadboard a third stage on the backend and start experimenting:)

[cjonesplay]

It worked! I added the end the Murkin circuit below as an add-on board on a switch coming from Tone 2 now it’s way harrier and does some octave stuff in the middle of the tone dial, just like the Spooky Tooth:)
I tried a pot instead of switch for the last stage, but the switch covers it.
Thanks for pointing me in the right direction!