Hi. Took the day off work yesterday and worked on my Ge fuzzface and a Miss Piggy. In the end I got so frustrated with the Ge FF that I pulled the guts out and replaced if with a Miss Piggy circuit. I simply could not get the Ge FF to clean up as well or sound as transparent as the Si Miss Piggy.
For those that missed the thread a while back, RG and I worked out a method of making a trouble-free Ge-sounding transistor by piggybacking an extra base-emitter junction on an Si transistor. The result in terms of a modified fuzzface was called the Miss Piggy.
A parts overlay for this pcb http://members.optusnet.com.au/~jethro.dog/mypic107.jpg is herehttp://members.optusnet.com.au/~jethro.dog/mypic108.jpg.
I spent yesterday experimenting with different emitter-bridging resistors until I settled on 1k for Q1/Q2 and 2k for Q3/Q4. (The higher the resistor the higher the gain from the pair of transistors) With the 4 PN100 transistors that I was using, I got an excellent clean and clear fuzz tone using 1 k in position 1 and 2k in position 2. I would say that the final sound was better than any Ge or Si fuzzface that I've heard or used before. With the fuzz control turned up to about 3 o'clock I was getting strong, clean fuzz and almost endless sustain.
I suspect that you could get similar results with 2N5088s/2N5089s/maybe 2N3904s??
:D Miss Piggy has kissed a magig frog :D
brett, I don't remember, does adding those resistors in reduce some of the highs too?
I will also recommend bc109's. I have some NOS bc109's that simply sound amazing. I've also tried 2n2222s with some success, as well as 2n3904.
I definitely agree with your statements about germanium Fuzz Faces. I have a dunlop reissue that doesn't sound half as good as my piggy. I'm going to replace it with a piggy circuit becuase I love the cool round case.
A FF Case would be nice.
On a similar not Brett, I too played with the PNP Ge FuzzPig, and ended up with the lower Hfe ones in the 'active [1&3] slots. ,
The 'draw' sockets ]2&4] didn't seem to notice so much which transistor was in there [all between 148 and 197 Hfe gain Ge's mostly NTE158's], as much IF a transistor was in there. I didn't try any Si's.
Q1 {Active] is Hfe 104 with 2k2 // Q3 [active] is 148 Hfe with 4k7.
Though this design has solved alot of problems, it has also created a whole new set of variables to tweek with and consider...not to worry, the 'coarse adjustment' [of having the extra parts in there] seems to get one quickly close to the bullseye, and the 'fine' adjustments can be made from there.
So much of FF's sound depends on so many things,... this technique really smokes...