Maestro Bass Brassmaster

The Brassmaster was originally designed for bass and also picked up by guitarists. The circuit is very unique and originals are hard to come by. I was able to lay it out to fit in a 125B with board mounted pots.

Maestro FZ-1A Fuzz Tone

I got to see the Rolling Stones a couple days ago and when they kicked into (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction as their second encore, I realized I hadn't laid out the effect responsible for one of the greatest songs of all time.

The FZ-1 used 2, AA batteries to run off 3v, and the FZ-1A used a single AA battery to run off 1.5v. The circuit was designed to be friendly with the wide range of hFE gains and leaky germanium transistors in production at the time. So when you're picking out transistors for Q2-3, either pick leaky high gain or low leakage and low gain (less than what you'd use in a Fuzz Face). Original units were positive ground effects with PNP transistors. I've laid the perfboard side out for positive ground and the PCB side for negative ground. I've also added some extra components to get supply voltage down from 9v to about 1.5v, so you can daisy chain it with other effects (if you're building the negative ground version).

Maestro FZ-1S Super Fuzz-Tone

The Maestro Super Fuzz-Tone was introduced in the early 70s.  It uses 6 transistors, 2 of which are used as clipping diodes. Original transistors were 2N5133s, but 2N5088s or BC109Cs can be good subs. I've built 2 clones of this pedal in the past (though not with this layout) and used 2N5088s with good results. The original Balance control was a 30k dual gang pot, which you would probably have a very hard time sourcing. In both my clones I used a 50k with no problems, but if you want you can put 82k resistors between lugs 1 and 3 to get the dual gang pot to around 31k, though it will mess with the taper some. Said Balance control acts almost like a clean blend, and the switch offers 2 different tones. If you're tired of Big Muffs, give this one a try. Works great on bass too.

Here's a couple really short demos I did on guitar and bass on one of the clones I built a few years ago (pardon my butchering of a couple Black Keys songs).

Maestro FZ-1B Fuzztone (2 transistor version)

This was (I believe) the 3rd iteration of Maestro's Fuzztone fuzz pedal. The first 2 used germanium transistors and AA batteries. This marked the changed to silicon transistors and a 9v battery. Originals had 2N3860 transistors, but 2N2222s or 2N3904s would probably work just fine. Couldn't find any info on the diode, so socket and experiment. I also couldn't find any demos of the 2 transistor version (there is also a 4 transistor version of the FZ-1B), so you'll just have to make it to find out!

Maestro MFZ-1 FuzzTone

Not the Maestro stompbox that produced the classic "Satisfaction" tone, but a good sounding fuzz nonetheless. This came out during the Norlin era of Gibson/Maestro in the 70s. The original used a TL022 opamp, but I've listed the TL072 because it's more likely to be in your parts bin. I've also up'ed the power filter cap from 2.2µ (which wouldn't do a lot) to 47µ.

Here's a demo of an original: