Build Your Own Clone Message Board

This is something worth trying out, I think. I accidentally created this while trying to breadboard Escobedo's Harmonic Jerkulator, which his take on the Harmonic Percolator, but with easy-to-find parts. Man did I screw up, but somehow it worked. And then I started tweaking and adding things (D1, D2) and switching stuff around. What I ended up with is quirky but quite usable. It's somewhere between an overdrive and a fuzz. Volume is a fair bit above unity, but it's not enough to be considered a boost.

So if you have the inclination, give it a whirl on the old breadboard and see what you think. I'm interested to see what other people think of it.


Parts sub notes:
• Q1 can be any low-gain NPN
• Q2 can be any low-gain PNP
• D1, D2 can be germanium or just about any other kind of diode. The higher to FVD, the less clipping and the more output volume.
• C1, C2 can also be changed. Higher value - more bass and more fuzzyness, at the expense of high-end clarity. Also, keep in mind that with the switch engaged, the two caps are in parallel and their values are added.

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Function f(x)
TightCamera - Gear Reviews

2N4403 and 2n4401, wowsers
How low gain again?

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Those are cheap, common TO-92 plastic transistors. They have gain around 150-200.

You can use 2N3904 and 2N3906 just as well.

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Function f(x)
TightCamera - Gear Reviews

150-200, spank you
Got a powering Q for you and the other gurus here.
How come you sometimes use 47uf, and other times 100uf?
That's C6 in this scheme, for all you following from your sofa at home.
Depends on circuit or what?

No real reason. 47u is plenty, most of the time, for power filtering. And if there is another large cap in the circuit, I will use the same value for the filter cap to make parts ordering easier. So if somewhere else uses 47u, I'll go with that. If there is a 100u elsewhere, that's what I'll use for the power filter cap.

Just trying to keep things streamlined.

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Function f(x)
TightCamera - Gear Reviews

Good enough for me

Also, 47u is usually smaller/shorter. And on a dirt box, the filtering isn't nearly as critical as it is on modulation and delay.

Take a look at how much filtering is on the Shoot The Moon, for example.

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TightCamera - Gear Reviews

This is my all around favorite fuzz. If you switch betwixt germ and sil diodes to ground it's extremely versatile.
I will have to try your variation. There are a few circuits in which I try to improve - this was never one of them.(except for the diode switch)

Another thing I love about this circuit is that it's not that fussy about values; you can really deviate and it still sounds ace.

Already?

Just to be clear, this is NOT a workalike for the Harmonic Percolator. I was trying to set that up, but I screwed up the orientation of the transistors all kinds of bad (take a good look at how things are arranged here vs the real circuit). But since it worked, I decided to tweak it more and add the feedback clipping diodes and changed all sorts of other stuff.

So yeah, if you want to build a Percolator clone or something similar, avoid this one. I'll be doing a PCB layout for a Percolator workalike in the next couple weeks, so stay tuned for that.

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Function f(x)
TightCamera - Gear Reviews