Hipster fuzz face

[MacHeath]

Here's my hipster build. It's my first 1590a build. The babyboard build guide proved valuable and everything fit inside, even the huge 2N3440 can. I wanted to try a silicon fuzz face, tried different trannies and eventually settled on a 2N3440 in Q1 and a 2N3904 in Q2, with an hfe of 90 and 200 respectively.





The thing sounds great, I was amazed with the cleanup. It has some great overdrive and distortion sounds! I'm gonna play around a bit with some cap values to voice it especially for my tele /Marshall setup.

I found out that the trannies have a huge impact on the sound and noise. The really high gain BC109C sounded way too gainy and compressed to me. I had a BC107B that was noisy and dark sounding. I also liked a couple of BC550B with hfe of about 280.

Nice bonus: while testing some high gain trannies I suddenly heard jazz music coming through, it was tuned to some jazz radio station in Bucharest! Which is over 2000 kms from Holland so that was fun. Once it was boxed there was no noise or foreign radio stations anymore