Hey, nice.
That's my first peek at it too. Has a little of that steam-punk thing going on. My deep gratitude to Dave and Jon for taking what was a little hunk of perfboard with a bunch of pots and switches hanging off it, and turning it into something that
feels and
looks like a prize. I feel like the person who sits in the corner, drinking beer, telling the movers to put the sofa over there, and the wall unit over there, then has the audacity to whine to their friends about how how hard moving is.
The innards (and outtards).....
The "Body" switch either lifts the cap that runs in parallel with the 100k resistor from V+, or selects one of two alternate values. The net effect of adding one of the caps is to "thin out" the tone.
The "Mode" switch selects either a lowpass filtered sound (middle position), the stock midscoop (side position 1), or a no scoop full-bandwidth sound (other side position). The middle position tends to be kind of dull and woofy, unless the fuzz is turned way up. It is not
especially useful, except for maybe bass, but it was a freebie that came with a 3-position switch, so I left it in.
The Shift control varies where the lowpass filtering rolls off. This has different consequences, depending on the mode you've set it to. In the middle Mode position, it varies how much of the lower mids are added in. In the midscoop position, it varies the width and focus of the scoop. In the full bandwidth position, it essentially varies how much bass is added in. It's pretty simple, really. The stock unit has a 10k and 15k resistor in series, with a cap going from their junction to ground. I just replaced some of that resistance with a pot, stuck suitable fixed resistors on each end of the pot to get 25k total, and ran the cap from the wiper of the pot to ground. The hard part was a little bit of math to figure out what the "outside" resistances needed to be to nail the right range. Most of this is documented in various posts I've made about the FY-2.
You'll find a trimpot on the board. I felt the transistor I used for Q1 had too much gain, so I added the trimpot to add some resistance between emitter and ground, and turn it down. I tried to set it so that there was a reasonable large enough contrast between min and max fuzz settings, although one is entirely free to adjust it from where it is presently set without anything getting screwed up. I didn't feel it was the sort of thing whose frequency of tweaking meritted making it a panel control; K.I.S.S. principle and all.
The thing I love about the circuit is that it doesn't take very much at all to deliver a much broader palette of sounds to work with. Nice to hear it exploited with some of that 60's psychedelic finger vibrato, the way nature
intended it to be used. And, as your video illustrates, pushing it a little with any sort of booster can easily get you into imploding-pedal territory.
Congrats again, and thanks for the video.
