How I built a wall of FUZZ pedals!

In 2020 as I wanted to make some serious noise, I decided to find a way to make my own fuzz pedals. These were all built of mostly out of either recycled (scavenged from old broken electronics) or vintage NOS parts I found in junk drawers in thrift stores. Playing around with unstable components makes for a pretty wide range of unique sounding pedals, that all have good and bad days, like we all do. Some interact better with some amps and speakers, than others do.

They are all surprisingly different sounding, eventhough the basic schematic is mostly the same for all of them.

The sounds can range from sweet, cleaning up nicely with use of the volume control to extremely violently sounding machines

Most of these are recieving changes over time as I feel like tweaking them, and I will update the pedal descriptions, images and audio samples.

Hear some of them in action on the Nightmares of Christ recordings.

This have been a learning and fun experience for me, and this page is meant to serve as an inspiration for you to take the journey into pedal building.

1. Fox, Leaves and Acorn

- Modified Bazz Fuss circuit.

- Sounds perfect if you put it after an overdrive. It gives you more of all that you wish the pedal you put through it had more of.

- White dial is bias, silver is gain, red is volume and switch chooses between a blue LED which is louder and crisper sounding than the other diode.

- You can hear it on Boundless by Nightmares of Christ (Fulltone OCD into this one into a Quilter 101 and a Quilter extension cab).

2. The Black Bear

- Modified Bazz Fuss circuit

- A ton of different diode combinations

- Left switch gives you 3 diode options, volume in the middle and 6 different diodes to choose from on the right hand side (1N4148, 1N34A, 1N914, 1N4738A, 1N5817, 1N4001).

-LED clipping added later

3. Carlin Fuzz

- Fuzz Face circuit - pretty straight up, but mounted in a small enclosure and using an eyelet instead of printed board or point to point...and it has George Carlin's eyes that moves around when you do.

- One fuzz dial and one volume dial, cleans up pretty well.

4. Planet Eater

- Modified Fuzz Face housed in an old wahwah enclosure the output is controlled by the foot.

- Left side dial controls the fuzz and the right side the bias.

- It has an enormous amount of output and when you slam it it sounds as if the planet collapses hence it's name

5. Mr. Brisket

- Modified fuzz face where you can set the bias on both the transistors, there is a dial for changing the input cap - and there is a switch that activates another transistor that functions as a clipping diode

- Very fat and full sounding and that clipping transistor really makes a difference.

6. The Parrot

- I made this for a friend and gave it to him before I remembered to snap some images of it. It sounded very much like Mr. Brisket, but with and additional chirping sound when you set it just right. It ate batteries like if it was sunflowerseeds, so of course it was named The Parrot.

7. All Caps

- Modified Fuzz Face where I took just about all the caps I had in a box and made all the caps switchable (very out of spec values available too) and added a couple of diode clippings too on the output that can be dialed in.

- Although it was just an idea I had it turned out to be an extremely wild sounding machine. I don't know if it's because some of the caps might have dried out, but it sure can make some wild, exploding sounds.

- Excellent for recording, but hell to find a sound twice with all those settings.

8. El Habano

- Modified fuzz face

- Japanese transistors from an old Sony Walkman from 1970

- Clipping diode switch

- Input cap switch

- Very, very fat sounding

9. + 10. Pipfjäs and Einar

- Two very similar looking Fuzz Face circuits that only has a volume knob and an input cap switch.

- I wanted to make my own circuit board so these are made out of some old junk holey board and some eyelets hammered in.

- Although they look similar the transistors are carefully chosen from their hfe so one sounds like a 60s fuzz while the other one dooms like there will never be a tomorrow.

- If they both are switched on at the same they do wonders for each other.

11. Eat Kit

- Modified Fuzz Face that is always on and you control how much fuzz you want with your volume control on your guitar.

- Switchable input caps makes this one really good both for guitar and for bass.

- Goes from pretty sweet fuzz ala 60s recordings to the gnarliest imaginable tones if you want those - and since the bias is set up right it cleans up just fine at most any setting.

12. The Fish Screamer

- A very strange and cool thing happened a couple of times while building pedals: instead of a fuzz I would get this synth tone. If made a switch that could change the caps I would make that tone change pitch. So I figured out a way to dial it in.

- This one has a scream knob. The scream knob lets you dial in a feedback note that can be very loud or be inaudible until the input signal gets low enough - then it starts to generate a randomly generated note pattern.

- The cab switches makes for changing the pitch of the screams, and for making things get pretty out there.

13. The Spirit Box

- A very gutsy sounding fuzz with a lot of bells and whistles. I attempted to make something similar to no. 12, but got carried away and ended up making something different again.

- Always on, for now.

- Added LED clipping that lights up if you hit it hard while dialing the knobs in.

14. The Thightness

- A dialed down version of no. 12. It has some of the core features, but does not have cap switching and so on.

- I named it The Tightness because it was an unbearably tight battery compartment from the tape recorder where I got the transistors for no. 8.

15. Space God

- Germanium transistors, so it's heat sensitive. Which can be good, and also a drag. But I added a bias dial, so it can be fixed unless you play on the surface of the Sun or on Antarktis.

- Hard shell leather case with a compartment for a 9v battery.

- The footswitch is not an on/off switch, but a fat switch. It is always on and the components are dialed in so that playing this though a high gain amp makes for a very sludgy doom sound.

15. The Churner

- Laughably large, but at least it has a handle.

- Always on

- Uses a whole lot of LEDs from a broken headlamp that crumbled.

- Has a Helipot for a dial (https://www.beckman-foundation.org/about-foundation/inventions/helical-potentiometer-helipot/) which acts like a normal pot, but it just keeps on turning and turning making for some very precise adjustments.

- Great sounds for black metal and grind stuff

- Many switches and few dials.

Expression pedals

a. The EYE!

- This is a super simple setup: flashing lights at this photoresistor will make the resistance rise and fall - which changes the value in the expression input of eg. a delay pedal

-Housed in parts I had laying around made it look outer worldly and the shiny surface made the light reflect oddly.

(the housing was reused for the Parrot fuzz).

- You can hear this thing in action on the Film album by K D'letta.