building my first effect box

[superbassman2000]

hello everybody, i am thinking about builing my own effect box, mainly just for experience and fun, and i was thinking of making the tweak-o...Invalid Link Removed one sounds like it will work well for guitar, but i was wondering about bass. Are there any substitutions i should make to make this work better for bass? although i am new to effect box building, i am no stranger to electronics, so don't worry about being too technical. Thanks for the help!
Charlie

 

[tplyons]

Tis a good kit, actually the one I started on. All I can say, is I really didn't like the sound of it either way, so I sold it to a buddy for $40.

 

[Passinwind]

superbassman2000:
hello everybody, i am thinking about builing my own effect box, mainly just for experience and fun, and i was thinking of making the tweak-o...Invalid Link Removed one sounds like it will work well for guitar, but i was wondering about bass. Are there any substitutions i should make to make this work better for bass? although i am new to effect box building, i am no stranger to electronics, so don't worry about being too technical. Thanks for the help!
Charlie

OK, for starters: try LEDs in pace of the two clipping diodes; this will raise the clipping threshold, so bass will be a little less puny. Also, try two regular diodes in series on one leg, and one diode on the other. This will change your harmonic balance. Try two on one leg, and three on the other, as well.

To make a really useful bass fuzz, I'd recommend at least two fuzz circuits in parallel, but tuned some "musical" interval (5th, octave, octave plus 5th, etc.)apart. For starters, just vary the input capacitor values by 1.5, 2, etc., and keep the other input impedances constant. Throw a simple low pass filter (shunt capacitor) on the top of each fuzz output, tuned likewise. You could bandpass filter the fuzz inputs instead;, that'll sound quite different, much buzzier.

You'll probably want a straight-through leg mixed in, to preserve bottom end. This is easily done with a simple inverting op-amp mixing stage, see the "Op Amp Cookbook" if you're not already familiar with what I'm talking about.

Let us know how you make out. Bass fuzz is an interesting problem, and it took me a long time to come up with something I really like. I use fuzz mostly for slide bass, which complicates things even more.

Invalid Link Removed

----Charlie Escher