A Little Fuzzy Muff Diving

I don't know if many of you will remember the op-amp Muff Fuzz I built a few years ago, because I had nearly forgotten about it myself. Anyway, I remembered there was also a transistor version, so I decided it was time to try that version for myself. The goal with this was to see how the two differed and try to be clever by putting together two Muff Fuzz circuits to see what happy accident I could create. The problem being, Electro-Harmonix already thought of this and made a pedal called the Double Muff decades ago, so I'm S.O.L. there. Undeterred I still needed to test how different a transistor version sounded from the op-amp version.

Well, they do sound different. I read one review of the transistor Muff Fuzz as a fuzzy overdriven amp with a torn speaker, and that pretty much hits the nail on the head with this clone I've built. I used old transistors, as I do, which were in the 500 HFE range. Almost all of the resistors were used stock as well, with the exception of needing to make the 2.7k, because it's a super odd value although it shows up sometimes. I used 82nf caps instead of the two 100nf, because I'm all out of 100nf. I'm temporarily using an A100k volume, but I will be removing it later. So there are clearly reasons why this sounds different, apart from op-amp vs transistor, but I didn't know just how different they would sound until I tested them together.

I first tested them each on their own, to get a base line of what each sounded like. Then I tested with the transistor version running into the op-amp version, which became an aggressive distortion that I quite like. Then I tested it with the op-amp version into the transistor version and it just sounds like a boosted transistor version. The transistor version sucked all the distortion out of the op-amp version and made it sound way too mellow. Now I'm wondering if I should build another transistor version to see what two of those sound like, or if I should build another op-amp version and stick it on the tail-end of the transistor version I already have to get that aggressive distortion I liked so much. In the name of science, I almost have to at least build another transistor version. Seriously.