tone bender- rocking before boxing noise?

[claytushaywood]

I just finished my first tone bender build on an old pastyface board.  I used a charge pump to convert to -9v for my PNP's too... just curious as I've built some high gain fuzzes before but never a tonebender.  Is it normal to have a whole crap load of noise in these before boxing?  I've never built anything with this much noise prebox... Sounds pretty good as far as i can tell but damn its noisy!

i was using a 1 spot and single coils with everything open on a breadboard.  Is shielded cable nescessary for these guys in your opinion?

Thanks!

[Bret608]

I would be willing to bet that would get a bit less noisy once boxed. Hopefully someone more experienced can weigh in about the shielded wire!

[Scruffie]

Tone Benders can be very noisy depending on transistor orientation, you may find swapping them around lowers it.

Boxing will solve some but not all the noise, they are inherintley noisy though due to the treble and germanium transistors.

[soldersqueeze]

I just finished a tonebender w/ 2n404a transistors and a charge pump, and it's pretty damn quiet to be honest. When you box it up keep cable runs as short as possible if not using shielded cable- I used non-shielded throughout, but my in/out cables are barely an inch long and away from the PCB.

[pryde]

My Mkii circuit was very noisy on the breadboard, heard hiss, fizz, fuzz, farts,...and a country-gospel station being picked up by the circuit 

Quieted up once boxed. This is a high-gain circuit with tons of treble so likely to be noisy if dimed.

[claytushaywood]

Thanks for the replies fellas!  also curious if having the leads on the germs fully extended (ie: not clipped at all from small bear) might be contributing to this noise as well? 

I'd like to clip em and solder em in rather than socket em, but i'm scurred

[pryde]

Thanks for the replies fellas!  also curious if having the leads on the germs fully extended (ie: not clipped at all from small bear) might be contributing to this noise as well? 

I'd like to clip em and solder em in rather than socket em, but i'm scurred

I would preserve the long leads and quickly solder them if they are good trannies. Likely would not make a difference in noise

[claytushaywood]

Oddly enough I've found varying degrees of noise with different amps and walls... mostly the battery is quieter but sometimes the 9v is quieter.

so i clipped the leads unforuntately, after not quite realizing what "transistor orientation" meant when mentioned above.  is that why you often see tonebenders with long leads covered in spaghetti insulation?  so that you can move the transistors around to decrease noise?  does their proximity or just orientation in general affect noise?

[Scruffie]

Oddly enough I've found varying degrees of noise with different amps and walls... mostly the battery is quieter but sometimes the 9v is quieter.

so i clipped the leads unforuntately, after not quite realizing what "transistor orientation" meant when mentioned above.  is that why you often see tonebenders with long leads covered in spaghetti insulation?  so that you can move the transistors around to decrease noise?  does their proximity or just orientation in general affect noise?

I meant the orientation regards what position you put each transistor in the circuit, the circuit needs varying degrees of hFe & leakage in the 3 positions so transistor swapping can net you completely different tones and a lot lower noise, a transitor that is noisy in Q2 may be great and low noise for Q1.

It probably is possible for physical orientation to affect the transistors if they're metal cans and particularly leaky but I wouldn't worry about it.

The spaghetti insulation is to stop the leads shorting against each other and possibly colour coded for C,B,E.

Did you add a series resistor and filtering caps to the power supply, the series resistor can be pretty important in these germanium builds.