A Pair of Wooly Fuzz Pedals

Fuzz pedals are one of the more popular builds in the DIY community because of the variety of options, both vintage and modern, out there. Fuzz and Distortion sounds formed the foundation of rock and blues music in the 50s, 60s, and 70s with the Maestro FZ-1 Fuzz Tone commonly thought to be the first available effects pedal being released in 1962. For these two builds, I used the Aion FX Calliope board which replicates the Catalinbread Karma Suture - which in of itself is an adaptation of the earlier Interfax Harmonic Percolator. The Karma Suture is a fairly modern pedal first released as a germanium transistor based version in 2014. A silicon version followed in 2016. They're not terribly expensive or rare, but they are a great simple build which will let you get a pedal for a fraction of the cost of an original.

I decided to do both a germanium and a silicon version of the pedal. In the image above, the Ge is on the left and the Si is on the right. I put a silver dot with a chrome paint pen on the Si version as I was building both at the same time and I wanted to be able to easily distinguish the two boards during the process. While the stomp switch daughter boards are identical, the resistor, capacitor, and diode values are different between the two versions, and I didn't want to get them mixed up. 

For the germanium version, I went ahead and sourced a Russian IT308B transistor (the big top hat transistor at the top) and used a vintage style PN2222A transistor for Q2. The set up of the board is really good, with three different outlines / configurations for Q1 depending on which build and transistor you're using. It also calls for a NOS Germanium diode, so keeping with the Russian theme I grabbed a D9K diode visible in the D3 slot. Because the board is designed to support multiple versions, all of the diode and resistor slots aren't used in any one version.

The silicon version visually isn't quite as "cool" as the germanium version, simply because it is using the standard transistor form factor seen on most modern transistors. I'm using original 1N914 diodes on all of my builds, and if you look carefully Q2 is reversed relative to the silkscreen. That is because I managed to source an original BC550B transistor for the build, which has the emitter, base, and collector reversed to the standard US configuration. This was another build where my Peak Atlas DCA came in handy!

For enclosures I decided to go with something totally original. The name "Calliope" reminds me of circuses which reminds me of clowns, and I really didn't want to go there! As these are "fuzz" pedals, I decided to just go the "fuzzy animal" route and have a couple of sheep variations. The silicon fuzz pays homage to the Shaun the Sheep series. The germanium version just extends that, but enclosure-wise is a little less exciting. I'm still trying to get the feel of both pedals, but at this point I slightly prefer the germanium version.