Current Lover and fuzz face. Bad interaction (help plz)

[rmfx]

Howdy. Buddy of mine wanted a FuzzFace and Electric Mistress in the same box. "No problem".

Made a fuzz face, works great. Made the Current Lover. Got it calibrated and dialed in, sounds phenomenal.

Put them both in the box, each one works nicely on their own, but together they are completely unusable. Very noisy, tone changes significantly, LFO pulsing/ticking. Tried recalibrating the CL a few times and while I could get ~some~ of the noise and ticking to reduce, I would still say they are unusable together.

Tested voltages on ICs compared to what is in build docs. They are close, so that shouldn't be a problem. Grounds are all connected. Sharing power from the same DC jack, maybe it's worth testing them with isolated power.

Any ideas? Know something that I don't? Need more info?

[madbean]

What type of FF is it? NPN/PNP, etc.
Not sure yet what might be the cause.

[rmfx]

NPN, 108/109

[rmfx]

Isolating power supplies for CL and FF did not help.

Tried re-routing signal wires, didn't do anything.

If I turn ON the fuzz face with the volume/gain up, I can hear ticking/pulsing from the disengaged CL. Turning range and speed does affect it. Turning range to zero makes the ticks/pulsing go away (CL engaged or disengaged), but obviously you loose the depth from the flanger.

Tried replacing the LM324 with a TL064. That changed the characteristic of ticking/pulsing to be more thumpy, but other weird sounds still present. (readjusted clock when I swapped chips).

I guess I was just asking for trouble putting a fuzz face into another box with something else.

[madbean]

You could also try inserting an always on buffer just before the input of the CL. Like an op-amp or JFET (for something low parts count). Perhaps that would help with the noise.

[Govmnt_Lacky]

Opinion Alert:

Any Fuzz/Distortion/OD circuit is going to AMPLIFY the signal. I believe what you are hearing is bleedover from the CL into the Fuzz and it is being amplified.

Since they are in the same enclosure (and..if you want to keep it that way) your best bet would be to shield any and all incoming and outgoing signal wires to/from the FF. A mighty task but that is step 1.

If that doesn't work, then you would need to ALSO find a way to shield the FF PCB (Ugg)