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You have lots of space for a circuit, but a switch is probably too tall and that case might not be robust enough to handle being stomped on. Therefore, I say go with an effect you wouldn't turn off: A foundation overdrive (amp sim of some sort), or perhaps a compressor. But if you want a fuzz that's pretty easy to make on perfboard and sounds great, I have several good ones in my perfboard layout. The Sam Ash Fuzzstainer is a really good one that I built recently, lots of good sounds in it and it's super rare. But if you just want suggestions on fuzzes, it's hard to pick just one.

I haven't used anything except my paypal balance in perhaps a year. (Well, sometimes it dips into my bank account if I used the Paypal for something else.)

Yeah, Jon's got it right, it's fingers. i remember a quote from Jerry Cantrell when they opened for Van Halen in the Carnal Knowledge tour, and he played through Eddie's rig with Eddie's guitars playing Eddie's songs, and he still sounded like.......Jerry Cantrell.  The Nuge said something similar when Damn Yankees had the opening slot.

I wasn't being flippant or really talking about sounding like one's self, though. There's stylistic ticks from the left hand of course, but sonically, I sound the way I do because of fingerpicking. It's a particular kind of physical relationship with the strings on the guitar that doesn't exist once you use a plectrum (or even, I'd argue, fingerpicks).

I just don't use enough "stuff" otherwise and the only effect I use consistently is a compressor set to a light setting. A clean amp with a tiny bit of reverb and often a little bit of delay.

Fingers.

As threatened in the "weekend plans" thread, I did finish up my ZPSDX today. I'm pretty happy with it, but the feedback knob seems to only be usable up to 9:30 or 10 o'clock. After that, it's into self-oscillation. Anything I can do to spread out the usable range?

Use an audio taper, or strap a small resistor across lugs 1 and 2 to change the taper.

How low? "Sounds dirty" -- in what way? The clean and delay signal, or just the delay signal?

Post voltages, remove it from the box to your test rig (unless you know it worked 100% correctly before you boxed it, in which case you need to check the wiring in the box), and audio probe to find where the volume loss is occurring.

Pictures of the other side of the board may help.

I didn't know you could just stick a germanium transistor in place of the BS170, I just assumed those would bias differently. But it seems to fit the rule of thumb: JFETs bias like tubes, MOSFETS bias like bipolars. Interesting.

MOSFETs require both positive and negative bias on the gate (or a reference bias voltage), which makes their biasing appropriate, for the most part, for any type of transistor (FETs still work if you put positive bias on the gate, and in fact it can be beneficial sometimes, but in this case there's only one place that the pot would make sound), and they require the input cap. So if we'd built a FET booster instead, it wouldn't have been able to accept other types of transistors.

If I wanted to make a project or test board that could accept all three types of transistors and still have a full boost, it would be an AMZ MOSFET booster with trimpots for the drain and source resistors. The gain pot on Jack Orman's booster is just so much better than the SHO's, but the SHO has fewer parts and is less complicated.

Is the clip at the top of the enclosure for the extra transistors?

It's two pieces of double sided tape -- the other three transistors we tried out are stuck between them.

Also, the voltage regulator is a L7805ABV.  I was always a bit weird about it, because it doesnt look like the one in build pictures.  it's bigger and more square...  could this be it?

Does it have the heatsink? It's just backwards if so.

My friend Mike Friedman -- who commissioned the Van Gogh mini pedal duo and the mini Engineer's Thumb -- asked for a soldering lesson. Instead of just having him sit around soldering a mesh of wire, I thought this would be more fun.



Rullywowr gave me a little Fo-SHO boost board a while ago, and it was lying on the bench, so I decided we'd build something on that rather than go straight for perfboard. I figured the circuit's biasing and caps were appropriate for several types of transistors, which would add a bit of fun once it was built. I didn't have the schematic in front of me, but I figured it couldn't be too tough to wing it (I did eventually print one out for the schematic reading lesson and realized that I should have used 10M for the base resistors instead of 2M2).

Mike did all the soldering, and considering it was his first time handling a soldering iron, he did a great job -- there weren't any cold joints, bad connections, or anything.

Along the way, I gave him a crash course in understanding the parts of a simple booster, and understanding biasing (and why the pot makes scratchy noises) and did my best to introduce him to the idea of impedance and how it affects things.

Once it was soldered up, we tried different transistors, starting with the MOSFET. Since he asked some questions about germanium transistors, we also tried a germanium transistor (gain 70), then progressively gainier silicon transistors (2222A, 3565, and MPSA13). He settled on the germanium because it was a little warmer, but we taped the other transistors inside the case so he could swap them out.

The we went through the boxing process, using one of Josh's optotron boards. I should have just had him solder the chip directly to the board, since it was sticking up so much, but the lid did fit in the end (just barely).

Finally, I did the letter on the case, since Mike was less confident of his ability to do that part even though it was just his initials.

The base color is Oz Green from Pedal Parts Plus, which is just an awesome finish.

In the end, Mike was really happy with what he ended up with, and I had a good time teaching him. And this is certainly far more robust a box than my first!

The record button makes a ground connection. Therefore, check everything connected to it -- you've probably got a solder joint with something around there connecting to the 5V power rail, so when you hit record, it shorts the 5v to ground and makes the regulator start to burn up.

Some things have gotten better, but it's still a time sink away from practicing, so who knows if I would have improved more just by playing more rather than building. I am much better now at understanding the sound as a whole than I used to be, so I think what I play has improved. I just think a little more deeply about sound than I used to.

Your questions in order:

9mm
yes, unless your drill-fu is amazing
no

Great work on the layout.

The klone buffer's output impedance is about the same as that of the Fatpants (figuring in FET oputput impedances compared with the 560R resistor in the klone). There might be a slight difference in the total bandwidth of the two buffers (I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the klone's has less bandwidth, but you can plug things into a calculator if you want to see which is best). Stacking them probably won't hurt; but it also won't do anything special. This is regardless of whether you have the klone or or off. When it's on, its output impedance is still below 10K. That's tiny. It's good enough to plug into a PA. :/

The second you have active circuitry between your guitar and another device (pedal, amp, etc.), it's decoupled -- the reason we use buffers is to avoid loading the guitar pickups with something else in the chain.

I'm gong to differ from everyone here and say that I think you should put your fuzz where it sounds best to you and works best with your set up. I prefer even Fuzz Faces after a buffered signal, even though some people think that's wrong. My guitar doesn't disappear from the mix when I step on my fuzz pedal, but maybe some people like that sort of thing ...