making my fuzz sound more "jimi-like"

makepeace · 2010-07-17T15:21:10+00:00

Hi guys. I've recently finished building a fuzz face based on the General Guitar Gadgets "Late 60's Boutique Fuzz". Its the one with a volume, fuzz, bias and contour knob, and a trimmer pot (for which i've just used a normal pot, ie a 5 knob fuzz) I always hear that Jimi Hendrix used the mysterious Dallas Aribiter fuzz face, but I can't seem to get close to it with this pedal. Listening to his records, his sound doesn't sound fuzzy to me at all, more like an overdrive of sorts.. I can get closer to it with the overdrive setting on my Cube on full! Am I on the wrong track with trying to build a fuzz pedal to get his sound? I got all of my parts from Small Bear including the real deal PNP germanium transistors, with a set of resistors with appropriate values. My pedal sounds great as a fuzz pedal. It does a dynamic Wolfmother tone very well, and is very versatile otherwise, going from subtle to crazy, and even doing a kind of polyphonic octave thing, but I can't seem to find Jimi in it. I looked at the technology of the fuzz face page at http://www.geofex.com/article_folders/fuzzface/fffram.htm and found this: So i was thinking the appropriate mods i could do to it would be to: 1. take out R4 (GGG schem) and jumper it. 2. replace R5 (GGG) with a 8.2kohm resistor 3. put a 1k resistor in series with the pot linking the 22uF cap to ground Do you think that would help? The other thing i might have to do would be to buy a few more sets of germanium transistors.. Anything else that I could do to it to help get a "Jimi" kind of drive? Another thing, I'm thinking about putting a voltage sag circuit in it, with a pot and a resistor setup as a voltage divider, to vary between about 6.5 and 9 volts. Would this in essence be doing what the trim pot is doing? I checked out with a multimeter and the trimpot seems to vary the voltage going into one of the transistors. Cheers :goodtimes:

makepeace

yea my fuzz has quite a prominent octave effect.. i've managed to get the tone a bit better using my strat type guitar (previously i was using a jazz archtop with a P90). Hopefully will improve lots with the 5E3 when its done..

MIKA-the-better-one

Tokai SA wrote I had the most Jimi like fuzz pedal you can get...the Kevin Randall Gypsy Fuzz...it doesn't get any better than Kevins pedals.
I tried for a month to sell it in SAfrica for R 1500...no buyers...sold it on a USA forum for R 2000,00 in 5 minutes.

http://www.krmusicalproducts.com/

I would have bought one in a second........ Really they sound great.... I would have been on that train......... let me know if you ever bring em again

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