Hi, so I built a Bazz Fuss for my friend (who paid for all the parts, so I really want to get this working properly), with a Battery Sag and BMP tone control that I found on beavisaudio.com
I'm going to try to remember all the little details, but honestly, I'm not completely sure about the order and timing of a few things.
The night I built it, it sounded good, but there was a really, really high pitch ringing in it on most settings. Even though it was running off of a battery, I wasn't sure if it had to do with my house or not (I've noticed grounding buzz on almost all of my audio equipment, and the bass amp was plugged into the wall), so I took it to practice and ran it through her rig. The tone was GREAT, but the high pitch noise was there, so we took it out, and went through with our regular practice. Afterwards, I wanted to mess around with it again, so we plugged it into her ac adapter (I'm not sure if it was plugged into that or running off of battery the first time), and this time it made a CRAZY high pitched screetch. I noticed that the screetch had something to do with the bass's volume being all the way down. The screetch only happened if the volume on the bass was all the way down, but when the bass had it's volume on it was fine. However, shortly after that I noticed that the pedals fuzz/distortion was gone. It just sounded pretty much like the pedal was bypassed or something.
Upon taking it home, I traded out some parts and got the fuzz to work via battery, but when plugging it into an AC adapter, the fuzz went away. I now can't get it to work again, even through the battery power. I don't know what I did exactly but here are some things I remember.
In my trouble shooting I have switched the transistor pins as well as the electrolytic caps orientations a couple times. Could I have friend them or something?
One thing that's also not supposed to happen is that if the AC Adapter is plugged in the pedal will activate even if there's nothing plugged into it (I thought I wired it so that it would only drain battery if a cord was plugged in the input). If the ac adapter isn't, the LED lights up a little, but not as much. I wasn't 100% sure of how the diode was supposed to be oriented, I put the side with the black line "Up" (according to the layout). Also I socketed the caps and the transistor, (...I don't know what info is helpful and what's not, so I'm just trying to be as thorough as possible!) and used an "Ultra-bright" Blue LED (I don't remember the resistor value I used on the LED, but it does seem to be a bit too bright, if that means anything).
so here's the layout I used for the PCB (I didn't use the wiring though):
When it was working, I had 10uf Electrolytic caps with the negative side facing the top of the layout (I think, but honestly I've switched them around a bunch at this point, so I'm not 100% positive).
I used this tone filter:
I used this "Voltage sag":
And I used this wiring:
--One this I had done different about the wiring was that I had connected the grounds from the input and output to each other. While trying to troubleshoot I cut that wire though. So it's they're longer connected.
...I might be able to send pictures later if that would help, but my camera's battery is recharging.
PLEASE help. This was one of a very small few boxes that I had actually gotten to work and I was really excited about it!
