Double Trouble

[Big O]

I finally finished a couple of pedals I have been working on for the past couple of months.  Basically I wanted to build a Grand Funk/Mark Farmer fuzz that was built into his Messenger guitar and featured on the first couple of GFR albums.

 

So how did I come up with 2 pedals?  Well the Tone Messer aka Messenger Guitar Fuzz is a pretty ratty fuzz-stortion with hints of octave fuzz.  When I breadboarded the Messenger Fuzz for experimentation, I got a fuzz very similar to Farner’s but it sort of lacked the hint of octave fuzz.  Because of that, I thought I would pair it with a Green Ringer and hence the two pedals.

The rest of this thread is about the Green Ringer, a board that does not seem to have been built that often (probably not fashionable in the Nostalgiatone era) and basically is an On-Off effect without any controls.

Of course I had to fix the lack of controls for this circuit and did my research to see what others had done.  So I added a Gain Control, a “Balance” Control (aka Null Control) and a volume control.  The final schematic is below.

Unfortunately there was no single source for the mods, so I had to piece them together from what others had done and posted in different forums.  The gain control is the second one I tried.  The first had a 6.2K resistor below the gain pot as someone had done, but just didn’t work well and affected the overall performance of the pedal.  See below.

Another thing I learned during my research was that supposedly using Shottkey diodes in the circuit give a better octave effect.  I guess this will be for another time.  Final pictures below.

I will eventually discuss the Tone Messer Fuzz in another post in the DIY section.

 

 

 

[Barry]

I always found this interesting. Thanks for sharing.

[Author]

Posts