Aion Solaris

[Thewintersoldier]

I feel like I really fell down the rabbit hole on this one. I love a good fuzz face and built a really awesome germanium ff a few years back. It's really good, but I wanted to try a silicon and really see what I could put together that would get me as close to the germanium as possible while being tweakable enough to work with almost any guitar or amp I throw it at. This one goes higher, further, faster!
    I initially had some terrible static and interference on the test rig and that was fixed by boxing it up. This is a monster.  I went thru a lot of transistors in this thing, set of matched, mixed and various gains. From 2n3904, 2n4401, bc108, bc109, 2n2222, bc550, 2n5088 and bc183. Landed on a pair of 183 on the lower end of the gain scale. I'm still messing with the bias so that's still a work in progress.
  I left off the pickup simulator cause i have one on another recent build and didn't find it terribly useful. I did add jumpers and a socket for the Q2 smoothing cap. I'm auditioning various values in there right now. I don't know if the back will be on this pedal for a while, it's a tweakers dream!

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[jimilee]

Nice!


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[Bret608]

Yeah, really nice! Here are some suggestions on collector bias for this: try Q1 at around 1.0v, and Q2 at about 5.5v. I did a hybrid ge/si Fuzz Face with a really low leakage germanium in Q1, so low that it basically behaved like a low-hfe silicon. It was a massive wall of thick fuzz with good volume knob cleanup as well. Having low gain in Q1 will definitely let it have this germanium-like behavior.

[Thewintersoldier]

Nice!


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thanks Jimi

Yeah, really nice! Here are some suggestions on collector bias for this: try Q1 at around 1.0v, and Q2 at about 5.5v. I did a hybrid ge/si Fuzz Face with a really low leakage germanium in Q1, so low that it basically behaved like a low-hfe silicon. It was a massive wall of thick fuzz with good volume knob cleanup as well. Having low gain in Q1 will definitely let it have this germanium-like behavior.

Thanks, I'm gonna try that out tonight after work for sure. Only thing I wish I could do with tame the brightness on the volume roll off. Fuzz up its nice and thick and warm, around 4 on guitar volume it's way to bright.

[Bio77]

Nice!  I like the smoothing cap socket. 

[mshuptar]

Very cool!

[cooder]

Excellent build again, very nice!
Tweaker fuzzes are great fun...

[Thewintersoldier]

Thanks guys, so I made another mod to it. I was constantly fiddling with bias to get different sounds and I took out the trimmer and added an external bias pot because 5 knobs wasn't enough haha. Also have some bc108b cans in it right now.

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[cooder]

Awesome! Might have to do that as well, sounds tempting!