What Makes the BAT Pharaoh Different?

[squirrels]

I play through an Orange OR15 and it hates most pedals, especially Muff type pedals, so I’ve done a lot of testing and tweaking. The amp is pretty much dirty all the time, it doesn’t know the meaning of clean. It does OK with Russians but it loves the Pharaoh. What is it about the Pharaoh that works with this amp? Is it the EQ? The pregain helps but I never added one to a Russian.

[squirrels]

In other Muffs I’ve built (except Russians) they sounded OK at with the tone pot fully clockwise or counterclockwise. Anything else was terrible. The Pharaoh isn’t scooped at all so maybe a fixed cap for more mids may help? I’d love to get a Mayonaise/Triangle type Muff to work.

[traktop]

As far as I remember the pharaoh wasn´t a super high gain monster even with pre and gain controls at 10. It wasn´t as bassy as the majority of big mufs I tried as well. In fact, It never convinced me on a clean amp due lack of character and focus on any frequency, but it really blends nice with an already cooked amp.
Months ago I tried different big muffs tonestacks on the duncan tonestack calculator, pharaoh included.
It was kind of flat all the time really, adding some low frequency bump with the pot fully anticlockwise, (but with a slight ramp down curve from the frequencies below that bump), and adding some high frequencies when the high pot is cfranked.
It really seemed like a no tone stack big muff throwed to a parametric eq mixer channel building touches of eq here and there.

[squirrels]

Thanks for the reply Traktop. I did a little detective work and looked through some schematics in Kit Rae’s site and the biggest difference I noticed  (besides the Pharaoh’s extra controls) between the Pharaoh and the 47 Ram’s Head was the 1k emitter resistor from Q4 (Q1 on this sites layouts). So I did some experimenting by building a Mayonaise with that 1k resistor and it sounded pretty good through my Orange. A lot of noise (same as the Pharaoh) but the low strings didn’t get all choked out.

It sounded kind of weak so I lowered the resistor to 150 ohms and it sounded much better without the low strings getting lost. The only changes besides the emitter resistor was using a 10k instead of 8.2k resistor from the collector of Q4 to the base of Q3 (using the schematic) and using 2N5088 transistors. I have a set of BC550Cs and BC549Cs to try too.

The Mayonaise schematic was found on this page, second from the bottom.

I’ve tried building different styles of Muffs to use with my amp before but this is the first success with a non-Russian Muff I’ve had where one sounded good with dirt. Besides the Mayonaise and Pharaoh, I also had a Colossus that works well with my OR.