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Aion Solaris

Started by Thewintersoldier, December 05, 2020, 05:22:44 PM

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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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Who the hell is Bucky?

jimilee

Nice!


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Pedal building is like the opposite of sex.  All the fun stuff happens before you get in the box.

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

Quote from: jimilee on December 05, 2020, 08:06:58 PM
Nice!


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thanks Jimi

Quote from: Bret608 on December 07, 2020, 02:34:51 PM
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.
Who the hell is Bucky?

Bio77

Nice!  I like the smoothing cap socket.  8)

mshuptar


cooder

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

Thewintersoldier

#7
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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Who the hell is Bucky?

cooder

Awesome! Might have to do that as well, sounds tempting! 8)
BigNoise Amplification