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The FuQQface is essentially a circuitbent Fuzzface, housed in what used to be a simple, single-pot volume pedal. The basic circuit comes from the 'VOX Tone Bender' schematic as found on R.G. Keen's "Technology of the Fuzzface" article. This is an NPN version of the Fuzzface, which is usually PNP, but is basically the same circuit. A key feature of these Fuzzface type distortion effects (besides the amazing simplicity) is its inherent 'touch sensitivity', which adds more or less distortion depending on how hard one plays into it. |
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I used a 2N2222 (silicon) as the first transistor and an AC127 (germanium) as the second. The values of some components were changed to make it sound closer to what I was looking for in terms of frequency response. First attempts used two AC127 transistors but this didn't really work. Seems that trying a few combinations of different high-gain NPN transistors to find a good match is the way to go. |  |
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| The main bend used to transform this circuit into something nice and weird was the wiring of the volume pedal's built-in 25k pot onto two points of the original circuit. This gets some kind of feedback - self oscillation thing going whilst seriously messing up your sound input. I also added an extra pot onto the tone control and a few switches to allow for various modes of operation. All the controls will affect the self-oscillation speed, but the range of this comes down to the value of the capacitor closest to the output. I added an bigger cap on a switch here for selecting between slow and fast oscillation modes. |
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I initially put this thing together experimentally with a bassguitar as input, but later found that the finished box is a great toy for mangling drumloops [see video 1]. It can be used to make things sound really juicy fat and will transform a loop in quite a wide variety of ways. The inherent input volume-sensitivity of the circuit seems to play a big part in this. There's plenty of bandwidth for crazy video processing, but the output needs the addition of some kind of buffer for that sort of thing. Below [video 2] is some video processing experimental documentation with the FuQQface and some other gadgets to help things along. |
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