Penfold Fuzz Unit - verified

[Freppo]

Here's an interesting fuzz by RA Penfold from the book Music Projects (1994).



Charles at Moosapotamus has a good article here

"Two parallel signal paths, a clipping style fuzz and an adjustable gain stage, are both fed into a voltage controlled amplifier (VCA). The fuzz goes to the VCA’s input and the gain stage goes to the VCA’s control pin.

As a bass or guitar effect, the fuzz circuit on it’s own does a poor job of reproducing the attack and decay dynamics that would normally result when a musician varies the way they hit the strings (playing harder or softer) because of the compression created by the clipping diodes in the fuzz circuit.

But, when fed through the VCA controlled by the parallel gain stage, the VCA tracks the player’s dynamics and, as a result, the output volume of the fuzz follows the original attack and decay characteristics of whatever instrument is connected to the input."

I built it and it works. Nothing mindblowing. The VCA action is pretty cool but the decay of the notes sounds alittle funny.. it dies very abrupt when the signal gets below the VCA threshold.

/ Fredrik