Bi Muff Variants From Tonepad

[AzzR]

I have ethced my board and am getting ready to start buildin my big muff but i dont know which one to build. Could someone please explain to me the difference in sound between the Big Muff Pi, The Green Russian Big Muff and the Triangle Big Muff and which one tends to sound better.

Thanks

Dream

[Fp-www.Tonepad.com]

The Green and Triangle are the 'accepted best sounding' (don't throw rocks at me!) ones, so go with either one of those.

The one I built was chosen by chance and it was the Triangle (also seemed to fit my parts bins better), so I built that one. I also have a regular big muff pi and the Triangle is my favorite one.

The other 'better' advice would be: build both (or all), and hear for yourself. But that's a lot of work.

Fp

[343 Salty Beans]

you have to remember that back in the day when EHX first started, a lot of their pedals were built with whatever parts they had lying around at that particular time. So allegedly, all the early big muffs each had their own different tone due to different caps, etc. So don't necessarily trust any vintage clips you hear.

A lot of the fun of building pedals is the variations you try, I think. I've been playing around with the Rat lately for different sounds, just for the heck of it. If you had the time, money, and energy, building all 3 would be cool. Then pick your favorite and trade/sell the others to your friends.

[slacker]

probably not much help but i built the green russian version. Mainly because I seem to remember them getting good reviews back in the days when I used to read guitar magazines.
In my limited experience of playing around with it I reckon the choice of transisters probably affects the sound more than the version you decide to build.

[DavidS]

I found my happy place with this pedal when I changed all of the inline decoupling caps to 0.1uF  film caps and modified the tone section to have two toggle switches, one for center frequency, and one to control the mid notch. Two DPDT toggles needed for this, made two tiny PC boards that mount right to the switches. Also using 2N5089 transistors, I think those are the norm. For the most part, I'm using the old, stock schematic. I might have different caps in the clipping stages, I can't remember.

[Fp-www.Tonepad.com]

were built with whatever parts they had lying around at that particular time.

And some of those are documented since they sounded really good (or someone thought so).

Fp