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Homemade Fuzz, whacky first effects project
While I was over at a buddies house playing his brand new Olympic While American Strat w/ rosewood board (jealously is bad, but its a strat and I want one 
) he had the idea to try and make a distortion pedal so we surfed the web and found a simple fuzz face diagram and started construction with components desoldered off of the board of a broken RC car and some other random cheap electronics junk. We didn't exactly expect it to sound even vaguely good or even work but we actually got it working. It sounds like ****, takes off the highs in a horrible way (i think because we have the wrong caps), goes from no gain to total distortion in less then half a millimeter of knob travel and blew out one of the transistors the first time he turned it on but what the hell, it actually works and it was made using not a single purchased part or parts designed for the purpose by a couple of 14 year olds without much electrical experience. What would you reccomend we do from this point on because we intend to replace all of the comonents with stuff of radio shack level quality and tweak the circuit. I would love parts recomendations or pretty much anything. We arn't really going for vintage tone as we have no way of getting NOS Germanium parts anyways but some kind of vaugely usable fuzz or distortion of any type would be cool. It can even sounds nasty is its in a cool way. I'll have to ask my buddy for some pictures since i can't find my stupid camera but when I get some i'll post them, it is ghetto to the first degree lol.
) he had the idea to try and make a distortion pedal so we surfed the web and found a simple fuzz face diagram and started construction with components desoldered off of the board of a broken RC car and some other random cheap electronics junk. We didn't exactly expect it to sound even vaguely good or even work but we actually got it working. It sounds like ****, takes off the highs in a horrible way (i think because we have the wrong caps), goes from no gain to total distortion in less then half a millimeter of knob travel and blew out one of the transistors the first time he turned it on but what the hell, it actually works and it was made using not a single purchased part or parts designed for the purpose by a couple of 14 year olds without much electrical experience. What would you reccomend we do from this point on because we intend to replace all of the comonents with stuff of radio shack level quality and tweak the circuit. I would love parts recomendations or pretty much anything. We arn't really going for vintage tone as we have no way of getting NOS Germanium parts anyways but some kind of vaugely usable fuzz or distortion of any type would be cool. It can even sounds nasty is its in a cool way. I'll have to ask my buddy for some pictures since i can't find my stupid camera but when I get some i'll post them, it is ghetto to the first degree lol.