Tweak Bird

Great band, reminds me a tiny bit of Black Sabbath ; )

1965 Tonebender mk1

Tonebender mk1 replica for Dave in Birmingham (the first 2 of 4 staying in Brum is cool!).  ACY22 Germanium transistors.  Features 2 trimpots for fine tuning the fuzz sound, and 3 Mullard tropical fish capacitors.  The circuit is built on to tag board.

Rehoused Danelectro Fab Echo

Danelectro Fab Echo (the red plastic one).  Rehoused and modded to extend the capabilities of the circuit.  New controls are Depth, Repeat, and Echo.  Whilst not capable of really long delays the new Echo control can go from long slapback to very fast , the Repeat control lets you send the sound into self oscillation (very dubby), and the Depth lets you turn the delay right up unlike the original pedal.  The pedal is now true bypass as well.  Soundclip soon.

Bass Fuzz Face with Bias control

Bass Fuzz Face for John.  Larger input/output caps, BC-108/BC-109 Silicon transistors, Bias control for the second transistor, 9v DC input.

Your Gonna Miss Me

I'm reading Eye Mind at the moment, a biography of the 13th Floor Elevators by Paul Drummond. Love this clip by the pool ; )

1965 Tonebender mk1

1965 Tonebender mk1 for Rich from Birmingham.  Tagboard construction, 2 trimpots to bias the 1st and 2nd transistors, acy22 germanium transistors used, waterslide decal labelling protected by a few layers of clearcoat.  1 of only 4 that I am making as I only have 4 sets of suitable transistors.  The second one is for another customer in Birmingham, 3rd one is for me, and the fourth will be a special one finished in gold hammerite.

Tube Booster

Tube Booster for John.

Labelled Shin-Ei FY-2 Companion Fuzz

Experiment with water slide decals on a FY-2 for Mickey.

Toshihiko Tanabes Buzzaround

Toshihiko Tanabe sent me this photo of his Buzzaround that I made for him.  He has added his own great looking graphics!

Germanium Little Bass Muff Pi

This is a birthday present for Neil from Seeland/Windscale.  It's the first time I have used Hammerite and waterslide decals.  Looks good but I made a slight error with the clearcoat which has wrinkled some of the top surface, lessons learned for the next time!  The pedal is a modified Little Muff Pi booster circuit, bigger input/output capacitors and an added gain control, plus I converted the whole circuit to positive ground and used pnp germanium transistors.  It's more of an overdrive than a booster now.  The circuit is done on tag board and using mostly cloth covered wire I recycled from a repair job.

Daves Fuzz Face

I sold Dave a Ge Fuzz Face tag board plus everything else he needed to make a pedal and here is the result of his work.

Ollies Buzzaround

Ollie sent me some pics of his self decorated Buzzaround.  Yes that's a 9V DC input, he persuaded me to add one!

Joes Tube Booster for use with synths

Joe sent me a "c64ised" photo of his Tube Booster in use, here's what he has to say - "My tubebooster has two jobs. The first is in processing my synth drum sounds. I'm layering up lots of component sounds then resampling the result through the tube to give it a bit of unifying crunch. Proper good.  The pedal's second job is as a live effect for my Dave Smith Evolver monosynth, which has lovely analogue oscillators and filters but a very digital all-or-nothing distortion. The tubebooster, used in moderation, gives my bass sounds plenty of compression but with warmth, soul and a bit of welcome unpredictably. That's not to say I don't crank it up from time to time too, and it's more than capable of full-on overdrive which sounds great on leads.  A quick but important technical note: the tubebooster is designed to accept an instrument signal (like a guitar), not a line signal (like a synth) so I needed to reduce my synth's volume to around 10% of normal (-20dB) before inputing it to the pedal. Also, because the pedal's output is an instrument signal, I'm running it through a DI box before it goes into my sampler. Anyone planning to run it straight into a guitar amp will be fine though; just remember to keep your synth at a low volume (around 10%).

Buzzaround and 1 knob fuzz

2 pedals for Juergen in Germany, did the 1knob on tag board and it has a 9v dc input and blue led.

Power Hungry - An Experimental Circuit Bent Compilation

Windscale have a track on the new Tiger Claw compilation, download for FREE at GetLofi.  Also if you go to the Windscale Myspace you can hear 4 newly recorded tracks with drummer Neil Spragg! Windscale Myspace

Burns Buzzaround for Ollie

Burns Buzzaround clone for Ollie.  1 hour of debugging revealed 1 solitary trace cut I missed on the board, doh!  works great now ; )

Tube Booster

Tube Booster for Joe.

Burns Buzzaround for Toshihiko

Burns Buzzaround clone for Toshihiko in Japan.

Fuzz Factory clone

Been waiting to use this enclosure for ages so I built myself a zvex Fuzz Factory clone using tag board.

Burns Buzzaround for Chris

Buzzaround clone for Chris in the USA, green led, ac126/128 transistors.

Seans fixed fuzz pedal

Sean gave be a pedal to fix a while ago, I won't name the USA based maker but honestly I have not seen such a shoddy piece of work that somebody has paid their hard earned cash for!  Anyway Sean gave me a new case and the guts of the pedal, had to re-solder most of the joints (terminal strip based circuit), most of the capacitors on the 6 way input cap rotary switch, new input and output jacks, new battery clip, pots resoldered.  Basically remaking the whole pedal!  So what does it sound like?  What is the circuit? A harsh sounding pnp Si Fuzz Face with switchable input cap and clipping diodes attatched to the volume control.

Silicon Fuzz Face

Silicon Fuzz Face clone for Tim.  BC-108 and BC-109 Silicon transistors used.  The circuit is built onto mini tag board and features carbon comp resistors, and a Mullard 0.01uf output Capacitor.  It also has an external Bias control and a 9v dc input.

Here's what Tim had to say - "Managed to get 5 mins with the fuzz this morning with the strat and vibrolux.  THIS PEDAL HAS SOME SERIOUS MOJO!  I don't know if it's the tag board+carbon comp resistors, or just some magic you have managed to instill but it is quite simply the most fun fuzz I have ever used.  I've currently got a few other fuzzes (roger mayer axis, voodoo lab bosstone, cornell nkt275 fuzz face, a triangle big muff clone and a colorsound overdriver clone) and have used others in the past but this little grey box is by far my favourite."

Tube Booster

Tube Booster for Neil (bassist for Windscale/Seeland).

Fuzz Face tag board

Fuzz Face circuit built on to a tag board, NTK-274 transistors, 20k bias trimpot on the 2nd transistor.

Shin-Ei FY-2 Companion Fuzz (again!)

I populated 2 boards at the same time while doing Seans FY-2 so here is another with the same adjustable scoop mod, but also with a blue l.e.d. and in a hammond style enclosure.