Pedal developed and produced by Frantone (don't seems in nothing with Fulltone, isn't it?) an american hand-maker little know here in Brasil. Despite of being a very odd woman, Mrs. Fran do a great work with your pedals but among all the one that stood out was the Peach Fuzz.
Now out of stock, the Peach Fuzz is only sold in custom shop versions by the dab of $445. The Peach's circuit shows many similarities with the OP-AMP Big Muff, although we can never say that it is a simple copy, since the entire structure of the circuit was modified to receive the IC LM386, IC with very strong gain, also used in 1watt amplifiers like the Rubi. As characteristic the Peach Fuzz has a sound with a sweet grainy texture, much sustain (like the Muff), and a remarkable bassy timbre.
Below are some samples authored by Kevin Glaz from the Pedal Plus site.
The Peach Fuzz was cloned by Danelectro in the Cool Cat series (series where many other boutique pedals that were taking notoriety also were cloned...) comparing photos of the Cool Cat Fuzz with the original Peach Fuzz the main differences are: the exchange of components by SMD, (perhaps) the change in some capacitors values and the switching of the IC TLC2262 by C4558, otherwise only the plastic key with electronic-switching, plastic box, etc...
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| Danelectro Cool Cat Fuzz X Frantone Peach Fuzz |
Through this video you can see how is subtle the difference between the original and the clone... largely due to the exchange of TLC2262 one critical part, and hard to find... (in my pedals I tried replace by TL072, TL022, 4558, LF353, LF442, and other ones that I can't remember now... I think that the best ones were the TL072 and LF442... some ones even increased the bass like the original, but also let the sound a kind of bad.)
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Details inside the Cool Cat Fuzz |
A friend of mine was crazy by this pedal, he is a fan of bassy guitar timbres like the Jack White ones and convinced me to accept the challenge of build it... the only thing we had was the scheme of SuperVelcroboy / Bajaman... I had never done any circuit layout before... then I looked for some program to draw circuits, I downloaded several but I ended up with the EAGLE because it had more material, tutorials, etc... but it is far from being a wonder, and was hard to get used to it and even I learn where to start to draw in that “rat nest” (literally). But after all the layout worked fine in the first try.
However, the schematic that I used was identical to the original Frantone which had a lot of unnecessary components that were part of a relay system that makes the LED switching of the pedal, since the Frantone pedals do not use (like me) the expensive 3pdts. So I redid the whole scheme of the pedal without the relay, and includes Milleniun already incorporated into the layout.
Below there is a video made with a very low sound quality cam, comparing the original Peach Fuzz and one of my old clones. In this video the only difference from the original is the replacement of the TLC2262 by the TL072. I can say that listening to these pedals live, they sound very.. veery close...nearly identical.
About the components, one of the difficulties of this project was the TLC2262, the not polarized 1uf capacitors (those yellow ones in the photo), they aren't very easy to find here (and are expensive 1,00R$ each one) ... vendors usually have those big blues polyester ones and the polarized ones, because of this I made the layout in a way to settle any capacitors including those big ones.
From what I saw in the photos of the Bajaman project it uses one layout identical to the original Frantone (I don't know how he got this layout), and in place of not polarized 1uf caps, he used the polarized even ... I do not know if the sound difference is significant ... but if you want to use polarized are much more cheaper (R$0.10)... to place them correctly is only to observe the cap polarity and put the negative side in the track near to the ground track.
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| Detail of the internal construction of my Peachfuzz |
To accommodate the circuit I used a folded box of carbon steel, plate # 18, with the same size of the Hamond box used by Frantone. The finish was made with electrostatic painting in white (these painting houses hardly powder coat paint in various colors such as the orange of the original pedal), after I covered with an vinyl adhesive (the kind you put in cars) and renamed the pedal to BitchFuzz ...
The knobs are the MXR kind (they are a fortune for a piece of plastic, three knobs R$15.00) but they look cool. I used a chromed LED support (similar to the original) and high-brightness LED (the original uses common LED). To avoid scratching the bottom of the pedal I put a couple of silicone feet (also present in the original Frantone).
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BitchFuzz's external finish |
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