The secret weapon fuzz

[lars]

Maybe somebody can shed some more light on this elusive circuit. During the recording of Siamese Dream, the Smashing Pumpkins used a custom fuzz effect referred to in this quote:
"But what the band and Dream producer Butch Vig refer to as the "super sonic fuzztone" - the foundation of Cherub Rock and Hummer-was more extreme still. An MSA fuzz unit was pulled out of an old pedal steel guitar by Triclops sound engineer Mark Richardson and placed in a simple metal box. Even with the tone and gain controls rigged it up it didn't look like much. What it did though, was rock like a bitch."
I found an old wiring diagram for an MSA pedal steel (attached), but unfortunately it doesn't shed light on the actual fuzz circuit board used.  Given that it has 100K pots for "attack" and "vol", that narrows it down some. My best guess is that it's a variant of the Jordan Bosstone, especially since Sho Bud made versions of the Bosstone and many pedal steel players used them.
Does anybody have actual pictures of this fuzz circuit? It would no doubt be a great fuzz pedal to clone...the "siamese dream sound" is one of the reasons I wanted to play guitar in the first place! People always have questions about what fuzz effect was used for various parts of the album, a Big Muff just can't do all that. Apparently this fuzz unit was the "secret weapon".

[Peteyboy]

I thought it was just a opamp big muff overdubbed several times. Here is a tone of info on that.
http://www.kitrae.net/music/big_muff_op_amp_history.html

[selfdestroyer]

I thought it was just a opamp big muff overdubbed several times. Here is a tone of info on that.
http://www.kitrae.net/music/big_muff_op_amp_history.html

I agree with this also, but its not uncommon in the studio for you to try anything that is laying around.

OP, This is a quote from the Pedal Steel Forum.

You can get a Boss Tone and get the same thing, If I remember right the M.S.A. fuzz was built from that unit, or ask Bud Carter how to set it up. When it came in the guitar it had two smal pots one for volune and the other was how fuzzy you wanted it..

Might be worth trying a Boss Tone.

Also found this on the same forum

I just received e-mail that said, the Jordan Boss Tone was bought out by Sho-Bud/Music City Mfg. Co, and they made them at the 2nd Ave. Sho-Bud factory. All the components were sold to Baldwin in the buyout of Sho-Bud by Baldwin Piano and Organ Co. In 1980 Baldwin moved the factory to DeQueen,Arkansas.

Here is a schematic

[lars]

Yeah, I've looked at many bosstone schematics, but none of them show a 5.1k resistor off the #2 lug on the attack pot, or a 47k resistor off the #2 lug on the volume pot. This is probably based off a bosstone with a few tweaks, but could also be something totally different.
It looks like the MSA S-12 guitar was the model the fuzz unit was pulled from.

[selfdestroyer]

All the posts I found on the SteelGutarForum say they sound "exactly" the same. I understand if you are trying to build the exact circuit but it sounded to me like you just want the sound of the pedal. A bosstone should nail it. There was a cool clone floating around call "Bag of dicks" and it sounded great. Shoot, I might build one now just cause the part count is so low and it sounds usable.

On a side note, Do you have a link to the interview where they talk about it being used on Siamese Dream?

[lars]

The link is here:  http://www.starla.org/articles/tgm1.htm
It's in paragraph six.

I also found a quote from Butch Vig himself that references this fuzz unit:
"We found a secret weapon on that record," says Vig. "A little preamp in a pedal steel guitar. It wasn't built for a loud guitar. It was built for a low output on a pedal steel, so it had this super high-end white noise gain that gave the guitar this sonic jet sound."

You can hear what this fuzz pedal did in the Cherub Rock solo. When the guitar track is isolated, that is definitely not a Big Muff, it sounds super grainy and way over the top.
The clip is here http://www.kitrae.net/music/Cherub%20Rock_Isolated_Guitars.mp3
Listen to the track at 3:05, that fuzz sound is ridiculous!

[mpace]

Hey Guys!

Just thought I'd chime in, better late than never, right?!?

I own a couple of 70's MSA steels, and one of them that I purchased back in '07 still had the fuzz unit in tact. I gigged with it up until a couple of years ago, when a cap started to leak and it would squeal whenever engaged.
So.... I pulled the unit, and it's been sitting on the sidelines until now... I always loved the sound, and my intention has been to box it so I could use it with all my instruments. I stumbled on this thread/forum just doing a simple search of the circuit... It's a really simple dual transistor fuzz circuit, and I always assumed it was silicon, but I dusted it off, and here's what I found:

Q1: T1598 PNP Ge
Q2: 2N4059 PNP Si
D1, D2: 1N4901 zener

So, yeah... I read this thread, and the presumption that the circuit was a Jordon Boss Tone struck me odd. Back then, Emmons, Sho~Bud, and MSA were the big three, and products/options such as these were self-developed with very little cross-pollination. The Boss Tone circuit is close, but to me it's more linear/compressed.

Im going to try to post some photos... bear w/me.
Being an old thread, feel free to email me w/ any questions off the board...

[selfdestroyer]

Very cool, thanks for the photos. Were you still going to box up that circuit? Might be a fun project for sure.

Cody

[lincolnic]

That is cool! Thanks for sharing.

I wonder who's going to be the first to make a new layout/reverse engineer the circuit now that we've got pictures of it...

[Scruffie]

I was looking for a new fuzz to build and came across these photos as i'd saved them and decided to trace them and *drum roll*

It is a very slight variation of the Bosstone... fixed 5k6 (I think, perhaps 5k1) input resistor, 180k off Q1 base to ground instead of 150k, can't see the input/output/base to collector cap values, I doubt Q1 is Ge PNP. Can't see how the pots are used, there is a stand alone 47k resistor with 2 leads coming off it...

[Willybomb]

That Bag of Dicks sounds great on the video demo.  Anyone got a vero layout or a schematic for that lying around?

[EBRAddict]

Here's a composite of the PCB, I tried to straighten out the perspective. Referencing the top unit layout it has the standalone resistor and the input resistor indicated as off-board but they seem to be on-board in the PCB pics.



If I have some time this week I can poke at a schematic it seems very much like the bosstone but if the post from above is correct and they're both PNP then the Q1 is in reverse bias.

[mauman]

Here's a schematic, based on EBRAddict's composite, some additional photos of vintage units at Steelguitarforum, the thread so far, and the BossTone schematics by R.G. Keen and Aron Nelson.  Clipping diodes are almost certainly 1N400x, but 1N4148 would work just as well.  Transistors are very likely the same as a BossTone, Q1 = Si NPN with an Hfe under 100 and Q2 = Si PNP with Hfe between 150 and 200.  At least these sound best to me in a BossTone, YMMV.   The input 5.1k and output 47k resistors were sometimes on-board and sometimes off-board.  Original pots were both B100k, but I like A10k for the volume.  I've also re-added the MSA wiring diagram that the OP had included but that seems to have gone missing.  Best regards, Mike

[diablochris6]

I remember an older post on this forum about achieving the Siamese Dream sound a few years ago. I can't seem to find it, so it might have been lost during one of the big forum hiccups. There was some talk about just using a Microsynth, but a good chunk of the conversation focused on using a Bosstone into an ESR Graphic Fuzz. The ESR had to be tweaked a little to play well with the Bosstone, but I copped a decent Pumpkins-ish sound from that setup. Might be worth looking into finding a particular sound and not a specific circuit.

[midwayfair]

Here's a schematic, based on EBRAddict's composite, some additional photos of vintage units at Steelguitarforum, the thread so far, and the BossTone schematics by R.G. Keen and Aron Nelson.  Clipping diodes are almost certainly 1N400x, but 1N4148 would work just as well.  Transistors are very likely the same as a BossTone, Q1 = Si NPN with an Hfe under 100 and Q2 = Si PNP with Hfe between 150 and 200.  At least these sound best to me in a BossTone, YMMV.   The input 5.1k and output 47k resistors were sometimes on-board and sometimes off-board.  Original pots were both B100k, but I like A10k for the volume.  I've also re-added the MSA wiring diagram that the OP had included but that seems to have gone missing.  Best regards, Mike

Hero right here ^