Build Your Own Clone Message Board

When I built my BYOC Leeds Fuzz (Super Fuzz) pedal, it didn't perform consistently. The sound would switch, or flicker between a very smooth, pleasant sound, and a gnarly, spitty fuzz. There was no consistency in how often the sound would change. It might stay sounding one way for minutes, or a half hour. Then it would switch to sounding the other way for minutes, or longer. I hadn't used a Super Fuzz before, and I had thought the smooth, pleasant sound might be how it's supposed to be, but it wasn't - the gnarly, spitty fuzz was the intended sound.

I later found out that the reason for the switching of how it sounded was caused by the solder flux I had used on the 3PDT switch, which is conductive. Signal was flowing between terminals on the switch because of the flux, which melted down around the terminals as I soldered wires to them. After cleaning the 3PDT terminals with isopropyl alcohol, the sound switching stopped, and it has since then always sounded gnarly and spitty.

The way the pedal sounded when it was smooth and tamer was really fantastic, beautiful. One of my favourite fuzz sounds that I've heard. If possible, I'd like to figure-out exactly how it was producing that sound, and mod my pedal to sound like that. But I don't have that kind of technical knowledge. What I do have is my pedal and the conductive flux I was using before.

Does anybody have any ideas on what could've been happening to cause the signal to not go into splattery territory, but to be softer and tamer, while still fully fuzzy? And also how I could go about replicating the effect I was getting?

I could jumper various terminals using a piece of wire and see what each connection does. But would that be dangerous, either to myself or the pedal? And might it produce a different effect than some conductive flux might've done (if the flux was letting less signal bleed than a wire would)?

I could apply the conductive flux to the switch again, try smearing it across different terminals and see what the effects are. But if I overdo it, assume I might get a different effect.

Aside from just experimenting with the flux (I think the cool kids call this circuit bending), your best bet might just be to find a different fuzz circuit that your really like and pair it with a green ringer circuit on a switch in the same enclosure. Then you could have the smooth fuzz you like and dial in some octave when needed. Or if you wanted to get really fancy, you could buffer, then split the incoming signal and run the ringer and fuzz in parallel, then recombine at the end. That would let you add individual volume controls for the fuzz and octave to really dial in the sound you want.

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