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Project Notes

#262 GuitarEffects/BazzFuss

The Bazz Fuss “chocolate noisette” - a super-minimalist overdrive/distortion/fuzz effect circuit.

BazzFuss_complete

Notes

I saw DIY Guitar Pedals build and demo the Bazz Fuss on youtube and had to try myself .. just to see how good it really is for about the simplest effect circuit I’ve ever seen.

Although not the true origin, the main source of information about the Bazz Fuss circuit appears to be at home-wrecker.com.

I tried the first, most basic, circuit (v1) on a breadboard and was pretty impressed by the sound.

I’m using an S9013 (chosen because I know it is a little dirty), and I ended up placing two in a Darlington configuration, though it only contributes a little to the waveform.

Here’s a comparison of a single S9013 and an S9013 pair.

  • CH1 (yellow) - 1kHz 2Vp-p sinusoid
  • CH2 (blue) - output, with output pot full on

First a single S9013:

scope_single_S9013

And then with an S9013 Darlington pair. Only a minor difference, but you can see that it retains more of the original peak shape when clipping. I think this adds a little more warmth to the sound.

scope_S9013_pair

Performance

Lovely warm distortion (chocolatey?). It does pick up quite a bit of RF noise (the wiring and non-shielded box I used in the final build don’t help).

Here’s what it does to a 1kHz 2Vp-p signal in the final build:

scope_full_range

Construction

Breadboard

Schematic

Testing on a breadboard:

BazzFuss_breadboard

Protoboard layout:

BazzFuss_protoboard_layout

Construction complete … the internals:

BazzFuss_internals

Build

Credits and References

About LEAP#262 Guitar EffectsAudio
Project Source on GitHub Project Gallery Return to the LEAP Catalog

This page is a web-friendly rendering of my project notes shared in the LEAP GitHub repository.

LEAP is just my personal collection of projects, usually involving an Arduino or other microprocessor in one way or another. Some are full-blown projects, while many are trivial breadboard experiments, intended to learn and explore something interesting (IMHO!).

The projects are usually inspired by things found wild on the net, or ideas from the sources such as:

Feel free to borrow liberally, and if you spot any issues do let me know. See the individual projects for credits where due. There are even now a few projects contributed by others - send your own over in a pull request if you would also like to add to this collection.