Fuzz Face meets Red Rooster!

[HamishR]

I have made many versions of the Fuzz Face circuit - some are nasty and thin and buzzy, some are pleasantly fat and corpulent.  So I thought - why not make one FF which can do both, and variations in-between?  THAT would be useful to me.

So I took the Analogman Sun Face BC108C and stuck the front end of a Red Rooster onto it.  I have had to make a few additions because I could never get a Sun Face to not squeal and misbehave without them.  And I added a small treble blocker at the end to help reduce the shrillness.  For me this is a FF which is fun and very usable.  Nothing wrong with a regular Sun Face but this is capable of crisper fuzz if you want too.

Things to experiment with:  If you want to be able to go even thinner and crispier you may want to reduce the size of the 4n7 cap on the input. And I'm thinking of trying a higher value on the treble blocker at the end - maybe even 22n rather than 15n.  It might make it sound a bit more Ge.  :-)

Anyway i hope someone finds this helpful. I used a BC108C for Q1 but a BC550C for Q2 to try to get a little more Grrrr and it seems to have worked.  The 108 has an hfe around 560 and the 550C is around 700-ish from memory.  I can some lovely fizz-free vocal sounds with this set up.



You can see that I have stretched the bias trimmer so that the middle leg spans an extra row.  The trimmers from Tayda can do this easily, but if it is a problem you might have to add a cut and a link.  And thanks must go to IVIark for the original Sun Face layout which I have adapted here.