Parasit Studio 8-Bitar

For Fuzz Friday, here's a really cool design from Parasit Studio:

The 8-Bitar is a minimalistic octave down pedal with a 8-bit sound (glitchy and gated square wave fuzz). It's small enough to fit inside a 1590A without any special parts.

The design goal with this pedal was to achieve the core octave tone from the Arcadiator, but with as few components as possible. I'm happy with the result since it only uses one chip (a CD4069).

Usual caveats apply for getting the best tracking - humbuckers, neck pickup and tone rolled off.

Parasit Studios Eagle Claw

Fuzz Friday! Freppo over at Parasit Studios makes some insanely cool stuff. Here's his Eagle Claw octave fuzz. You can probably squeeze it into a 1590a if you're feeling adventurous. In his own words:

The Eagle Claw is simple yet brutal, noisy and glitchy sounding CMOS-based fuzz with a full wave rectifier to produce a strong octave up. This circuit works best with high output pickups. It is a gated circuit by nature of the CMOS logic. If you are using single coils and need more sustain, try a boost or compressor in front. To bring out the strongest octave up, use the neck pickup on your guitar with the tone rolled down. The octave is most intense around the 10th fret and higher.

Parasit Studio Stepping Stone Overdrive

Here's an early design from Freppo from Parasit Studio. It's a punky overdrive/distortion transistor-based circuit. Here's the schematic for reference.

This was my first attempt at making my own overdrive from what I had learnt by building and modding other circuits. I had done a few heavily modded ones before, but nothing really original. I spent countless hours trying out different ideas on the breadboard before I was satisfied with the result. However, going back listening to this one now I find it alittle too thin/midrangy sounding, so I will probably revisit the circuit and improve it some time in the future.

Flying Guillotine Fuzz

For #fuzzfriday I present to you the Flying Guillotine Fuzz, designed by Freppo over on FSB. Here's what he had to say about it on his blog:

The front end, tonestack and the output stage are all borrowed from the Big Muff, but the two Muff gainstages is replaced with a discrete op amp (by Joe Davission) modified with a odd feedback transistor clipping configuration. It's a VERY loud circuit. Way louder then the loudest Big Muff I've built.