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Let's Get Started: Big Muff Blox

A project log for Audio Blox: Experiments in Analog Audio Design

A Project page to host and blog about my various analog audio circuit experiments and designs.

avrAVR 05/11/2016 at 16:450 Comments

So before engineering/hackaday-culture became my life music was my main hobby playing guitar, drums, bass, and singing, in that order ;) I collected a lot of guitar equipment over the years but one of if not the most defining piece of gear I have is my Electro Harmonix Big Muff Pi fuzz pedal. I got this pedal because of my diehard fandom for The White Stripes and wanting to make music like that. Throughout my shortlived musical experience playing in bands in high school the Big Muff was at the centerpiece of my sound. With all that said, back to the engineering!

So this initial project is what I call Big Muff Blox, unlike my PiModulos project which aims to be a general purpose Big Muff clone PCB this project is designed for experimenting and understanding the different stages in the Big Muff circuit. Big Muff Blox will be a collection of PCBs that contain each of the Big Muff fuzz stages like so:

- Input Stage

- Clipping Stages (both on one PCB)

- Tone Stack

- Output Stage

So in short Big Muff Blox will be 4 PCBs deividing the Big Muff pedal circuitry across four PCBs. The PCBs will be design to plug into a breadboard for testing, experimenting, and analysis. With that I give you preliminary schematics for each of the boards:

Input Stage Schematic

Clipping Stages Schematic

Tone Stack Schematic

Output Stage Schematic

That's all for Big Muff Blox, expect more over the next days but expect something different maybe later today, stay tuned!

NOTE:
I wouldn't be able to do this project and other Big Muff realted projects if it wasn't for this amazing website, check it out, this guy has everything there is to know about this circuit !
http://www.kitrae.net/music/music_big_muff.html

Circuit broken down and explained here:

http://www.kitrae.net/music/big_muff_guts.html

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