Vox Repeater

[Lord sonic]

Hi all,
I'm a relative newbie , have built 4 fuzzes. Just finished my first build with DC, toggle switches, led and artwork. The pedal is the Vox repeater, with suggested mods. Really happy with it, only problem is the output gain is to high, this great if you want a boost, but don't want it for that reason. Have seen suggestions for a volume pot which I may attempt on another version, but could someone suggest an alternative? I am assuming I would swap a resistor out for a differing value? Could someone please offer a suggestion as I am more than a little stumped! Ta!

[Madferret]

There's a couple of things you can do to decrease the gain of this, a simple one would be to swap the MPSA18 transistors for something with a lower gain (2n5088, 2n3904 etc), this could change the sound of the pedal though.  Of course that's only simple if you've socketed the transistors.  The volume pot you suggested is also extremely simple as you're just taking the output to lug 3 of a 100k log pot, lug 2 becomes the new output and lug 1 is connected to the ground row, this is probably the best solution as it doesn't require any modification of the circuit itself.  If you don't want a pot for the volume and just want to permanently lower the volume coming out of it you could try lowering the value of the 1M resistor between output and ground and then inserting a resistor between the 47n cap and output, essentially this would mean you'd have to have one end of the resistor soldered to the board and the other to the output lead.  That *should* work as essentially it's just mimicking what a volume pot would do but set to a fixed position, it's a lot of messing about when you could just add a volume pot though.  If you don't want an extra pot you could always use an internal trimpot, maybe put it on a small daughterboard?  Anyway, I hope this gives you a few ideas.

[Dave]

I had the exact same problem with mine so I added a volume pot, I then changed my amp and it was fine even at max volume. The lesson is, the results you get with this pedal also depend on the headroom of your amp, thus, if you change amps an external volume pot would be best, if you only ever use one amp then madferret's suggestion of an internal trimmer would be the best idea.
Thanks
Dave

[IvIark]

[Lord sonic]

All these suggestions are great! Can do the transistors, have 3904s. But I do like the sound, so internal trim pot for me I think. Thanks again for all the help, and the (hopefully) idiot proof diagram, thanks!