Hoofing It! Cloning the EQD Hoof...

It's either a little late or a little early for Fuzz Friday, but I just got this beauty together and had to get it out there. The Earthquaker Devices Hoof is an extremely popular silicon/germanium hybrid fuzz pedal. New copies run about $179, so it's not incredibly expensive, but it's not really cheap either. It's a neat sounding pedal, and since you can never have too much fuzz, I figured it would be a great addition to the pedal board if nothing else!

I started with the PedalPCB Ungula board for this project and used mix of vintage and modern parts. The resistors are all modern 1% metal film 1/4W - mostly Yageo, but there are a couple of KOA Speer ones thrown in. The film capacitors are almost all vintage Panasonic, apart from a couple of modern Kemet 6.8nF ones. The MLCC capacitors are all new production. The 2N1308 transistors are in the classic package, but it wasn't immediately clear to me if these are new or old production when I picked them up from Amplified Parts. The 2N3904 transistors are all new production.

The wiring follows sort of my "new" standard for PedalPCB boards with additional ground connections on the board. All of the jack grounds (center negative ground and input and output jack grounds) go to the board. I've been attaching the wires and wrapping the lead in heat shrink tubing on the audio jacks before soldering the ground wire to the board to minimize the ground line length. The PCB itself is attached to the 3PDT daughter board with ribbon cable, and then the input and output leads are run to the jacks. 

When my wife was painting up one of the batches of dinosaurs she painted, she worked up a triceratops with what sort of looks like Holstein cow markings, and I thought it would be fun to be the namesake for this particular pedal. I added the details on the top with a mixture of simple geometric shapes and licensed clipart. I even added a triceratops footprint in the bottom corner.

As to the sound, it's a fairly heavy fuzz pedal, but like many fuzz effects, the strength of the effect appears to vary a bit with the pitch of the notes being played - at least on my Boss Katana amp. I need to experiment a bit more with my other amps and guitars to understand the full range of the pedal. Based on some of the demos I've seen, I think it is going to pair better with my Les Pauls and their humbuckers than the hot single coils on my Chapman.