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This project started when I was toggling between two different dirt boxes with very different characters and thought to myself, "These would sound great in a mix together if I double tracked guitar with them!" My next thought was, "Why double track when I can just split the signal and run the effects in parallel?!" The result is the Peacock Parallel Fuzz: two distinctly voiced fuzzes that can be run independently or in parallel.



I had originally planned a two-tone finish on the enclosure with water slide decal graphics and labels, but a defect in the powder coat precluded this. I went for hyrdodip instead.



Boxing was as thrilling as a 1590A build despite being a 125B. This was a cram!



An input buffer feeds two fuzz circuits which are then mixed by an active mixer at the output. The "bybpass" switches really just cut off the clean input when the fuzz is engaged and ground the LED, or ground the fuzz output when the fuzz is off.

The yellow channel is a Harmonic Percolator that has been voiced to be as mid-range focused and percussive as possible. This stock circuit does not like being placed after a buffer. I tested a few different ways to address this including series resistance at the input and a pickup emulator and found that a mosfet in Q2 behaves much more nicely than a BJT and doesn't require any of these other, more involved solutions.

The green channel is a Fuzz Face doing its best Big Muff impression. The feedback resistor has been greatly increased to increase the available saturation. The mosfet in Q2 helps with this as well (and makes the circuit play nice with the input buffer). The tilt eq is voiced to be especially scooped. This leaves room for the yellow channel to poke through when the two fuzzes are used together.

Here' s a demo:

https://youtu.be/5pBw0EiVOWg

Here's the vero layout in case any one wants to build their own.



And here's the bypass layout since it might not be obvious from the schematic.

I was just looking at one of those on Reverb. Pre-amp on top and power at the bottom? I think it had a 15" spkr in it. Pretty odd but interesting. Is that the one?

That's the one! I've swapped the tone switch for a tone knob and added a tremolo depth toggle, as well as an input cap toggle on the "accordion" input.

The stock speaker is kinda honky (surprising for a 15"). Fender did offer a version with an Eminence Legend 1518 as well. Those ones have pastel tolex instead of brown.  A 15" speaker in a open-back cabinet can really fill a room if you position it in a corner!

Just watched the video. Rick makes two suggestions: 1) a license should be required to use music as part of a training data set, similar to the way there are sync or public performance licenses. 2) Anything that's 100% AI generated should have no copyright.

The first suggestion is reasonable and probably pretty uncontroversial. The second suggestion is subtly subversive. It assumes that AI is incapable of holding copyright. Tacit in his suggestion is the ineligibility of AI for legal personhood. That may or may not be a good thing, depending on your perspective. It also begs for a testable standard to be set for what is 100% AI and what is a significant human contribution. I imagine similar language to what is currently used to test "fair use" could be used: "Was the human contribution transformative of the original AI output?"

Any legal framework they do put in place will definitely be tested in the courts (read lots of lawsuits!) here in the states at least.

I use a Fender Excelsior with an Eminence Big Ben in it. It's not a very common setup...but it's the only amp I have. It's a pretty honest amp, though. If I can make it sound good through that, I can make it sounds good through anything else.

I've got some 1N34A's lying around—my local electronics shop had a whole roll of them, so I bought a handful. They read around 500vF for me. I also have glass bodied 1N60's that measure in the 350–400 range. DM me if you want a couple.

Honestly, though. Any diode with a lower forward voltage will probably work fine. If it were me, I'd through in some 1N518's and up the current limiting resistor to taste just to be a contrarian.

It's time to get out the magnifying glasses and tweezers and stock up on SMD!

Welcome! And ask away; we were all noobs once.

Absolutely love the theme! Excellent idea and execution!

Graphics and guts both look nice!

An "ugly proof" filter sounds nice. I generally like more options, except when it comes to auto-wah and compression.

Thanks, guys! I think I got all the parts form Tayda for this build. The green indicator knobs caught my attention, and I've always been a sucker for pastels.

I decided to try my hand at surface mount and this was one of the few projects I could find. It's a faithful recreation of the Benson Preamp. The circuit is pretty ugly proof, but it also doesn't have that much personality—at least not in my rig. I understand it's based on the preamp section of a Benson amp and I could see how the circuit would work well as a fairly neutral pedal platform amp. As an overdrive, it just doesn't have much personality. I word of caution; with this wide layout, the jacks are too close together to accommodate pancake jacks. 







All in all it was fun to experiment with SMD. This is a nice circuit, it just isn't what I'm looking for in an overdrive right now.

The original Rat uses a JFET as a buffer between the tone control and the volume control, so using the second opamp as a non-inverting buffer would be the closest to the original Rat. The original has plenty of output, so additional gain at this stage probably isn't necessary unless you are using germanium diodes, or something else with a low forward voltage.

Any non-inverting stage will need a resistor to VR at the input.

The reference voltage acts as a virtual ground, so there shouldn't be much of a difference in function between dumping things to VR and ground. Sometimes dumping to VR means you can save a decoupling capacitor. (Hopefully, I explained that clearly. Please let me know if I didn't.)

Really digging the base in the pre-chorus. That melodic, floaty, high stuff always gets me.

Alrighty then, yellow means phasor now. Suck it, BOSS! Your SD, OS, and OD pedals are now mis-colored.

Nice work!

I need to finish up my Glasshole. I ended up accidentally ordering 1/8W sized resistors a while back, which were actually rated at 1/4W...haven't tried ordering proper 1/8W in a while, to be honest. Are they really getting thin on the ground?

Maybe it's not the conventional phaser color...but would you really want a brown or green bananafanafophasor? I wouldn't. 

The only place I was able to find appropriately sized 1/8w resistors was from Tayda and they didn't have 4k7 in stock. I had to use 5k1 in the all-pass filter stages. It doesn't effect the sound, so it's fine. The only other 1/8w resistors I could find were SMD or some weird mil-spec things that were the size of regular 1/4w resistors.

This turned out to be an expensive pedal as I had difficulty sourcing all the parts. 1/8w resistors have become difficult to find! Still, it's a fun build and a great sounding phaser.



The small LED is the rate indicator. I jumped the pins of the rotary switch so that the LED works no matter how many stages are selected. I accidentally made more work for myself by placing both LED's under the PCB. There is essentially no clearance, but a little electrical tape keeps things from shorting out. I tested a few different colors and found that LEDs with higher forward voltages don't work consistently as rate indicators: red and yellow are fine, blue and green are not.



This is a very chewy phaser, which can be a lot of fun, but, like most phasers, it's incapable of subtlety and can mask the sound of the guitar. I added an "Intensity" switch to combat this. In the down position R8 is the stock 10k. In the up position, R8 is 20k. This reduces the phased signal getting mixed into the output, which effectively halves the depth of the phase cancellations. It still sounds like a phaser—just less intense.

I also found that I could stop the LFO and get a "parked" sound by connecting leg 3 of the Depth control to the 9v rail. The brightness of the internal LED could then be controlled with the Depth knob, allowing me to tune the phase effect. This only gave me access to about half the range of the phaser and only the first half of the Depth's rotation really did anything, so I decided not to implement it. Maybe someone more clever than me can find a better implementation of this.

All in all, a very good circuit. It does classic phaser sounds. Eight stage phasing allows you to get flanger-like sounds. Two-stage phasing with low depth and intensity sounds somewhat Leslie-like. There are lots of good sounds to be found.