Modern Clone of a Very Early Fuzz - The Roland Bee Baa

In 1972, Roland began introducing effects pedals. According to some, part of their failure to gain a real foothold in the U.S. market stemmed from the fact that the Japanese parent company chose poor English names for their pedals. The Japanese auto manufacturers often managed to avoid the same issue in this era, for example the 240Z / 260Z / 280Z, etc. instead of the "Fairlady Z" as it was known in Japan. One of the most unusual, and according to some the worst, was the Bee Baa - a fuzz pedal with two primary modes. One which evoked a swarm of bees, the other a flock of sheep - subject to listener interpretation, of course. Honestly, I think the name is hilarious, but given this was the 1970s, "Bee Baa" likely didn't scream "rock and roll." For this build, I used the AionFX Ibex PCB. The documentation only dates to last October so this is a relatively new project, and there were still a couple of mis-labeled capacitors (though the values were correct - a couple of films caps were called out as electrolytic and vice versa). 

As you can see from the PCB and bypass board above, there's quite a bit going on with this particular build. There are two stomp switches. One turns on the pedal itself and the other is for a clean boost. If you have the boost switch on, there is no fuzz, and the Boost knob essentially acts as a volume control. If you don't have the boost switch activated, then the pedal will be in fuzz mode - either "Bee" or "Baa" depending on where you have the SPDT toggle switch set. Honestly, I like both modes. They're very raw and early rock sounding - so if you want that tone, this pedal will give it to you in droves!

Overall I used mostly modern components on this build. All of the resistors are modern metal film, 1% tolerance resistors. The capacitors are either modern film capacitors or brand new electrolytic capacitors. There really aren't any diodes to speak of in the build (apart from the normal Schottky diode on the bypass), but there are three transistors. This is where I went old school. I managed to find three 2SC644 transistors to use in the build rather than using the recommended 2N5088 substitutes. What can I say, I'm a sucker for old transistors! 

Given I've already built up a couple of fuzz pedals with sheep motifs on them, I decided to stick with the theme of the original and just go with it. I found an old "BeeBaa" script I was able to roughly vectorize, and then modified some licensed clip art to create, well, a "BeeBaa". I'm sure the design won't be everyone's cup of tea, but hey, it sort of had to be done, right?