fuzz is an interesting effect. it was not so much the effect itself that intrigued me, but it was the interplay between dynamic choice and saturation that constitutes the 'fuzz' effect. apparently jimi hendrix's little wing was played with fuzz, but if you don't pay attention to the gentle clipping you may mistake it for a clean tone. its like talking to someone who speaks perfect english, but if you hear between the lines you can make out a mild scandinavian flavor to their speech. on one hand the fuzz can be used to add that 'accent' to a guitar tone, but that accent can be thickened to that of a smooth ESL expatriate like in tempalay's sonic wave or even to near incomprehensibility like in any my bloody valentine song.
my fuzz architecture of choice is the electro harmonix big muff, the iconic fuzz pedal that is as physically massive as it is tone-wise. specifically, the version 2 from 1973 had the description of being most similar to david gilmour's therefore i had to recreate that tone. i got the schematic from this page dedicated to big muffs, and recreated the schematic using kicad:
and with that i created the pcb below:
i am particularly proud of this pcb's spacing since the resistors were placed in neat groups, the ground could exclusively be done on the second side, and no vias were used. the corners were shrunk down because it took up space and may intrude with screwholes like my tube screamer.
at the moment, the pcb has not yet been printed as the day of returning to los angeles for my third year of university was drawing near, so it will be printed and assembled when i order it to the states. fortunately, all the components were sourced in hong kong, all i need to worry about is not botching transistor soldering.