DIY Jesus & The Mary Chain Fuzz Pedal
This was my attempt at the Jesus and Mary Chain Shin Ei Fuzz Wah. The Mary Chain pedal was famously faulty which I wanted to incorporate the same nastiness into my version. Also the original pedal was a wah-pedal, but I don’t have the means to build that. So I thought about it; a wah-pedal is essentially just a filter, so why don’t I just add a filter onto the original schematic, so that you can drive it into self oscillation creating the feedback that it was known for?
After building a few different schematics I’d found on the web, I went with this one as it sounded the best to my ears;
However, note that this isn’t the actual fuzz pedal schematic, but just the fuzz part of it. That’s ok, because this is where I add the following filter tat’s capable of self-oscillation;
I’ve put this filter into loads of different build before because it’s simple but sounds pretty good (or nasty if that’s what you want).
I then added numerous bypasses, and the ability to run the filter and fuzz separately.
For some reason after building this I put it away in the drawer and forgot about it, which is a shame because it sounded pretty much like the mary-chain in a pedal. I should probably get a batch of PCB’s made if I build any more because it was a lot of work making it on perf-board.
One day I’ll do that and post some audio-examples.