Miles Ahead Fuzz - a fuzz face platform

[Cortexturizer]

Hi guys, might as well share this one with y'all!

The idea behind Miles Ahead Fuzz is to basically have a fuzz face platform, a self-sustaining and self-sufficient fuzz face pedal that you could take with you wherever you go and always have the best sound, always be able to try any transistor you could possibly stumble upon, and be able to perform any mod on it with absolute ease. I originally wanted to sell these on e-bay with corresponding "mod kit" bags, that would contain everything needed to tune your FF the way you want to.

It started kinda like this



and then I took it from there.
The first version looked something like this





You can see opportunities for most of the mods are there, sockets for caps going between collector and base, cap to ground on the input to remove RFI, maximum fuzz restricting resistor, and other stuff...
There is a switch to reverse polarity, to the left it is positive ground, and to the right it is negative ground.
So all you have to do to transform the Miles Ahead Fuzz from Ge to Si and vice versa, is reverse the orientation of electros in their sockets, flip the polarity switch, and you are done. Then you obviously put the right transistors in, there's a trimpot for biasing Q1, and the potentiometer on the top of the enclosure serves as a bias for Q2. But, how will you know whether or not you biased the thing "right" ?
Here's how -



You have a probe inside, that measures voltage, and a LED screen that shows the voltage, a built in voltage meter. The picture is showing biasing the Q1 in the case of a Si FF.

Now you may have noticed the push pull potentiometer inside the enclosure, it is the pedal's Volume pot.
It's push-pullness does the following thing - it connects the voltmeter to the battery, and it connects the voltmeter to the circuit. You push the pot down again, it's completely out of the circuit.

So here's the finished product





[when you start the voltmeter and the probe, and obviously have no jack inserted, you get how much of the battery's juice is left ]



I only have a sound sample of the Si version, to tell you the truth I don't even remember what transistors of what gains were in there... [my friend was playing guitar, he has a sick right hand punch]
[soundcloud]https://soundcloud.com/ssmc/fuzz-sa-biasom[/soundcloud]

Currently I am using a "bonamassa" Gt-308V as Q1 and a PNP Si BC179 transistor as Q2, so it's a hybrid Ge/Si design at the moment, and I am loving it. It has the round and boomy bottom of the Ge FF and the aggressiveness and gain of the Si FF. Cleans insanely nice with the guitars volume knob.
I have some npn Ge Tesla's in the mail, so I'm gonna try a npn Ge in both Q1 and Q2 positions, but I am really eager to try a higher gain npn Ge as a Q2 and something sweet like a hfe 50 or 70 2N2369a npn Si as Q1. I have a feeling that's gonna rule. That way, the temperature instability will disappear as well, cause I'll have a Ge in Q2 and not in Q1.

I could go on about the FF forever...I spent way too much time tweaking it and learning stuff via trial and error method. I was obsessed by it...I still think it's the best dirt pedal ever. With my band I just can't use it unfortunately, because we're playing the kind of music that doesn't benefit from a fuzz face at all...but I would really like to have a band where I could use it as God commands.

Oh...and if you were wondering what kind of a snake is sitting behind the Miles Ahead Fuzz, it is my Jive King 20 combo [I won't embeed pictures and that way try to make it a little less of an off topic]

https://fbcdn-sphotos-d-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash4/261785_10150314404916337_5542524_n.jpg
https://fbcdn-sphotos-a-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-snc6/264972_10150314404126337_2829342_n.jpg
https://fbcdn-sphotos-c-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-snc6/270412_10150314403711337_5896686_n.jpg
https://fbcdn-sphotos-e-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash4/269688_10150314404411337_8339115_n.jpg
https://fbcdn-sphotos-b-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-snc6/269164_10150314404646337_5090732_n.jpg
https://fbcdn-sphotos-d-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-snc6/263191_10150314403876337_3803702_n.jpg

I don't know if there's a dedicated fuzz face topic here on the forum, but if there isn't I would really like to hear what you guys like, and if there are similar fuzz face lunatics here like myself.

Cheers!

[jkokura]

What an ambitious project! I'd really like to see a build document guide on how to build something like that! Of course, if you're going to market this, I'd expect you shouldn't do something like that. But your knowledge of the FF seems pretty supreme - thanks for sharing!

Jacob

[midwayfair]

That is one of the coolest things I've ever seen done to a fuzz. Brilliant idea.

[Cortexturizer]

No no my good man Jacob, I don't mind talking about the pedal to any extent! I wanted to start a topic with this build that would gather FF aficionados hopefully, a place where we could share everything we know, and don't know, cause making a FF, using it, and living with it, is pretty much living with another organism, kinda like a dark passenger room mate, you really have to adapt to it.
There are good practice of course, and complying to those you can make almost any transistor work, and sound at least decent.
I put two russian Ge's in there, with gains of 35 and 55 and we played it side by side with the Analogman Sunface nkt275 and it sounded really close, the Sunface has a polished, kinda like a studio sound, but the difference was really not that big of a deal, and some of our friends preferred one and others preferred the other. Hm, I think I can find that sound samples somewhere...aha!

[soundcloud]https://soundcloud.com/ssmc/fuzz-sa-biasom[/soundcloud]   so yeah, this is the Miles Ahead with high-gain Si transistors
[soundcloud]https://soundcloud.com/ssmc/ljubin-fuzz-sun-face[/soundcloud] and now the Sun Face
[soundcloud]https://soundcloud.com/ssmc/prvi-fuzz[/soundcloud] this is a 69 fulltone clone with russian Ge's [MP and GT's pretty much like the Bonamassa uses his, gains are 35 and 55 here, still a lot of fuzz produced right?]

It was my friend the whole time, a Robert Cray mexican strat into a Hiwatt clone.

EDIT: here's midwayfair in the meantime...cheers friend!

[icecycle66]

rad

[studiodunn]

..............and for the win!

Absolutely awesome.

[ch1naski]

And then I look at the mess I made, and I wonder how I can even call mine a fuzz compared to that ... That...... beast of a machine you made. Nice.

[jeffaroo]

well if your gonna sell it sign me up, and if not get a build report up.
i think your avatar would make for a better man on the graphic
look at him....Mr Fuzz the taveling fuzz salesman
awesome btw, bravo sir !   

[Pvt. Parts]

HOW MANY MORE TIMES...!!! 
tell me more abut the battery thingy plz

[raulduke]

Really nice dude.

Really, really, really nice!

You obviously know a LOT about Fuzz Faces.

Favourites out of the variants I have tried would have to be a Ge I built (standard FF component values) with old TI Transistors, and the good old One Knob Fuzz. I used to love the Meathead circuit, but have been swaying towards the more low gain, 'chewy' (if that makes any sense  ) Fuzz Faces recently.

[pickdropper]

Very cool build.  Impressive stuff there.

[gingataff]

I love it.
A tweeker's delight and sounds great too.

[monkeyssj1]

this is so cool! 

[Cortexturizer]

Thank you so much guys. I am really delighted to see how many cool dudes are attending this forum, you have really showed a lot of support to a new member like me...
I checked a couple of blogs that some of you are having, I love em all! I was particularly amazed by the quality of raulduke's stuff, amazing looking pedals, inside and out. Apart from his stuff, a lot of other stuff I've seen in the Build Reports forum is f-in fabulous work guys, much more ambitious than I have ever attempted, kudos guys.

"Mr Fuzz the taveling fuzz salesman" - this cracked me open haha, great man.

As far as the FF circuit goes, I don't really know what to say, or what are you interested in, I'm far from Jeorge Tripps on this one, but I think do know a lot, from experience. I would really like it if members of the forum would continue expanding on this topic somehow, but it all depends on their mood of course hehe.
I'm gonna do an update on this once the NPN Ge's arrive. Hopefully record some new sounds of that combination of trannies as well.

Just a couple of quick thoughts I guess -

Ge trannies have much more natural note decay if they are not crazy high hfe, but with SI transistors you gotta be really careful here, and tweak the hell out of it. I'm talking about bending a note and holding it, and then you experience as the note decays, some horrible lo-fi sudden death of the note decay. This can be prevented in a number of ways.
One thing that lots of people don't even add to their builds is the maximum fuzz restricting resistor. It's usually something like 10, 47, or 100 Ohms. This adds a lot of stability to your sound, and prevents buzzing sound when fuzz level is crancked. I took this advice from Skreddy.
You should experiment a lot with the 100K feedback resistor. Some guys, famous guys, they even make that a 500K.
Also capacitors over that resistor. A great way to prevent oscillation and maybe get rid of highs.
Jeorge Tripps and Dunlop do this as well, but it's under the board, in SMD technology. So when the customer opens his FF and sees the pictures of famous old builds from the sixties, they say, hm, yeah, this is vintage correct.
Don't put polarity protection diodes in your FF, nor additional electros for filtering. If you're gonna do that, and then buy some kind of special battery, than it's no good. You won't be able to tell a difference in different batteries.
Carbon comp resistors DO make a difference. BUT, I would almost say that I prefer carbon film resistors for everything! Metal films, to me, sound really tight and have the most highs, or treble, whereas carbon films are just in the middle, nice amount of sweetness in the sound, but not harsh. Carbon comps are really loose sounding, and have a liquid sound that's nice with some build and terrible with others.
You have seen my Pharaoh fuzz build, I made 4 of those, first with carbon films, then metal film, then carbon comp, and lastly carbon film again.
With this kind of circuit I like the metal films best, because it is already a loose sounding dist/fuzz. Carbon comp build sounded the worst, it was just liquid loose tone, you could not get any aggression of it no matter how I turned the knobs.

[icecycle66]

You've inspired me to build a fuzz face with top-external accessible sockets for experimentation.