The Very Model of a Modern Master General? A New Steggo Fuzz Clone!

Steggo had gotten a request for a clone of the EQD Fuzz Master General. That pedal is an update of the vintage Ace Tone FM-2 Fuzz Master Professional, which was famous for it's fairly untamed octave up character. Fortunately PedalPCB had a board ready to go in the Fuzz Cadet, so I grabbed a couple of boards and got cracking!

As with all PedalPCB board, the layout is very clean and tight. This makes populating the passive components, especially the resistors, very simple. The circuit is a bit atypical in a few respects. First, there are very few film capacitors - only two. There are, however, a lot of 1uF electrolytic capacitors in the circuit. This could be a result of the vintage DNA of the pedal, but I haven't dug into the old Ace Tone schematic enough to know (future project!). Most of the work is done by the transistors and diodes. There are five transistors, and two pairs of diodes which can be toggled or lifted all together. One set is germanium - the instructions called for 1N270, and I used some NOS ones I have for Distortion+ type builds. The other pair is 1N60P Schottky diodes.

The offboard wiring pretty much followed my standard pattern. I'm using aviation grade wire from Tube Depot for the DC jack and audio jack connections. All of these connections are insulated with heat shrink tubing. The PCB and foot switch are connected with ribbon cable, which provided me the flexibility to shift the positioning of the switch to the corner of the enclosure to accommodate the enclosure art. I'm using my "Steggo" 3PDT daughter board on this build. 

As to the enclosure, a "mega" fuzz pedal like this needed a suitably "mega" and suitably "fuzzy" mascot. In this case, it's not a dinosaur, but it is an extinct giant sloth with a total body length of around 6m (20 ft) which weighed around 3,700–4,000 kilograms (8,200–8,800 lb). That means it was roughly the same size as an Asian Elephant - so it seems to fit both criteria! According to Wikipedia:

"Megatherium (/mɛɡəˈθɪəriəm/ meg-ə-THEER-ee-əm; from Greek méga (μέγα) 'great' + theríon (θηρίον) 'beast') is an extinct genus of ground sloths endemic to South America that lived from the Early Pliocene[1] through the end of the Pleistocene.[2] It is best known for the elephant-sized type species Megatherium americanum, native to the Pampas through southern Bolivia during the Pleistocene. Various other species belonging to the subgenus Pseudomegatherium ranging in size comparable to considerably smaller than M. americanum are known from the Andean region."

In terms of the sound - honestly I really like the pedal. It compares favorably to the demos I've seen online, and really responds differently to different pickups. I'm not sure it is going to supplant my Black Ash clone on the board, but I can definitely see using it situationally going forward!