MOSFET Pie

Stumbled across this Big Muff variation designed by Anders over on the Tagboard forum. Seemed like a cool design for Fuzz Friday. Here's what he had to say about it:

Inspired by Skreddy Top Fuel and a DIY muff project One Knob Gilmour I have been tinkering with a big muff circuit using mosfet transistors for all four gain stages along with mosfets wired as diodes in the second clipping stage. I've been using 2N7000's just because I have tons of them but other mosfets like BS170 should work as well. For more variety I added AMZ big muff tonestack. 

Sounds tighter than a regular muff and has more distortion elements than fuzz. If any fancy building this shielded wires is a must since the gain is pretty high and it's on the edge of oscillation when pots is dimed. 

Coupling cap values is mostly from Violet Rams Head muffs to give a balanced tone but those could be tweaked to desired values as well as the small BC caps. 

Craig Anderton Tremolo

To say Craig Anderton's body of work is vast is probably an understatement. But within that body are several DIY classics, and this tremolo is no exception. This is a modified/updated version, specifically in the power section with a +/- 9v charge pump. The vactrol in the original is VTL5C1, but some combination of home rolled LDR/LED combo will probably work (you'll just have to experiment a bit). Schematic here. It'll be snug, but it should fit in a 1590B.

Greer Amps Lightspeed

Wondered about this one for a while (but always suspected it was YATS). The best way to describe the Lightspeed (that I can think of anyway) is it's kind of like a Timmy with the bass and treble controls fixed and a simple treble cut tone control added just before the volume pot. The most interesting thing with this is the clipping, with 5 diodes in asymmetrical orientation (3 going one way, 2 going the other). Should fit in a 1590B or 125B nicely with board mounted pots.

EHX Bassballs

Not sure I missed doing this one ages ago, but better late than never. The Bassballs is a classic envelope filter that's been a staple of Electro Harmonix's line up for a long time. Designed for bass, but works great on guitar as well. Trimmers are very dynamic and might be fun as external pots. Also if it's super loud, adding a volume pot at the output is super easy—remove the 47k resistor off the Out pad, wire the Out pad to lug 3 of an A100k pot, lug 1 to ground, and lug 2 becomes the new circuit output. Here's the schematic for reference. Should fit in a 1590B, though it'll be a tight squeeze.

Christine Oscillating Fuzz

Here's a fun noisemaker for Fuzz Friday. It's an oscillating fuzz built around a CD4049UBE hex inverter and has good range of noisy fuzz tones on tap. Schematic in here. Read that a B100k works better for the Frequency pot and an A20k works better for the Starve pot. YMMV

JHS Haunting Mids

The JHS Haunting Mids is an EQ circuit that controls the mid frequencies along with giving a 10dB clean boost. From the JHS site:

The Mids and Sweep controls work very closely together so you can find the perfect frequencies to boost or scoop mid frequencies. When the Mids knob is at 12 o'clock, no frequencies are boosted or scooped.  Turning the Mids knob to the left of 12 o'clock will begin to scoop out midrange frequencies, while turning the Mids knob to the right of 12 o'clock will begin to boost midrange frequencies. The Sweep knob controls the what frequencies will be affected.  Sweep knob to the left will cause low-mids to be affected, while Sweep knob to the right will cause hi-mids to be affected.  The Lo/Hi toggle is like a "Q" function and controls how sharp the frequency peak is that you’re affecting with the Mids knob.  "Lo" is a softer and wider peak for slightly subtler affect as you tweak the Mids/Sweep knobs.  "Hi" is a sharper and steeper peak giving you a very pointed and defined effect as you tweak the Mids/Sweep knobs.

Should fit nicely in a 1590B. Schematic for reference.

MI Audio Tube Zone

Here's the Tube Zone distortion from MI Audio. Original has 6 knobs with the Presence pot internally as a trimmer, but I know how you guys like to fiddle with knobs, and the layout was turning into a 1590BB size anyway, so I made it external. Schematic available on FSB.