I've been on a bit of a muff quest the past few months with bass and have finally figured a few things out. I recently socketed a lot of components and a madbean board and built an "ultimate" muff that works pretty well as a boost, dirty boost, slight overdrive, and fuzz. I call it the Gold Muff and it's a mix of Green, Civil War, and Ram's head in a gold enclosure. The diodes are switchable from silicon/none/led in both sections and there is a tone wicker footswitch. I like it for what what it is and for the fact that I can play around with the clipping for a while to see what I like and if I actually use the options in a real band setting.
I realized, thought, that I want a dedicated "fuzz" muff on my board. For that purpose, I liked the sound of LEDs in the clipping diode sections on the Gold Muff for real Fuzz. I thought that perhaps an Ungula/Pedalpcb Hoof clone would fit that bill. I don't have a lot of time right now, so I just bought a built one off of Reverb. It "kinda" did the trick, but I felt like it wasn't letting enough low end through and as a result wasn't thick enough. Also, the clipping was more on the top end and not as full frequency as I think bass needs. Also, the builder didn't use germanium transistors (which I happened to have one hand). So, I applied some of the same component values that worked on my Gold Muff-- basically replaced the 100n coupling caps with 220n caps and the 100n clipping caps with 47n caps.
And, of course, while I didn't have time to build an Ungula/Hoof, by the time I did these mods and fixed the broken traces and pads from component removal... it took just as long as making one from scratch!
Sounds really good, thick, and fuzzy but not fizzy. Liking it a lot so far. I can post pics, but there's not that much to see!
