DIRTY BOOTS TWEAKS

jrod over at FSB is planning on building a DIRTY BOOTS, and asked me what kind of tweaks could be made.  it's really a highly variable circuit, and can be tailored to your specific tone very easily.  here's what i wrote to him-


there is a lot of tweaking that can be done to the DB.  you might want to lower the collector resistor on Q2 as it is a bit voltage starved.  if you want less drive, increase the resistor in between stages, or take out the bypass caps on the emitters.  also, you might want to increase the collector resistor on Q2 as it is kicking out pretty much full gain, and that can make it a bit noisy.  maybe try 1K.  it all depends on what you want.  if you want it brighter, lower the value of the compensation cap from C to B on Q1 or put a 47K resistor in series with the input.  adjust the in and out caps for low end.  it's a really easy circuit to tweak, so i would just put it on the breadboard, and figure out what you like for your amp.

TRIODE FUZZ NO.2/ AMZ SIXTIES STYLE FUZZ TAGBOARD LAYOUT

a while back, i posted this little article on a couple of fuzz circuits i found on the triode electronics site. the first is very similar to a fuzz face style circuit, where as the second is a little bit different. it has what appears to be an emitter follower into a kind of dc coupled complementary gain stage pair. very much similar to the jordan bosstone. here is a link to the original article.


http://apocalypseaudio.blogspot.com/2009/05/triode-fuzz-1-2.html 

while surfing around the voluminous pages of Jack Orman's AMZ effects website, i saw something that looked a little familiar.

http://www.muzique.com/schem/sixties.gif

it seems that the triode fuzz and the amz sixties style fuzz are one in the same!  most likely, this is an old circuit taken from one of the many electronics "cookbooks" from back in the day.  regardless, i've heard from a good source that it's supposed to be a great sounding circuit, so i decided to draw up a layout- this time for tagboard construction.  tagboard, eyelet board, or turret board can be a fun way to do your circuit board construction for a change.  there is no etching or drilling to be done, and you get to use those nice sounding axial foil caps that would've never fit on your pcb circuit.  i really like using this particular tagboard that can be found at weber as well as apex jr. for very reasonable prices.

https://taweber.powweb.com/store/fb-v.jpg

it has 3 different solder points per tag that makes it very easy to find holes for your passives, actives, and wire without running out of space.  the layout i made for the triode/sixties fuzz circuit was made specifically for this type of board, but you could easily adapt it to other types of tagboard out there.  i haven't built it yet, but i do plan to in the near future.  as always, let me know if you decide to build it yourself.

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i got this thing on the breadboard, and had a rough time getting it to bias properly.  i'm going to try and figure it out, and i'll post anything i find.

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due to problems with this circuit biasing correctly, i have pulled the layout.  i'll post a new tagboard layout for a better design shortly.  looking at this one with a more informed set of eyes, there are many things that could be done differently to make this a better design.  i'll post another tagboard layout for a proper fuzz circuit once i get it checked and verified.