Friday 10 March 2017

Sunn Buzz

Basically this was Sunn Amplifiers take on the Maestro FZ-1A, but with Silicon transistors instead of Germanium. Best description I found of the tone was this.

Depending on the setting of the effect control, it can go from classic "fuzz face" sounds and beyond - achieving the sustain of a big muff. It's a three stage, high gain, low voltage solid state amplifier circuit.

I was unable to to find any videos of it, but as soon as I saw the words Sunn and Fuzz together I knew I had to take a crack at this pedal.

The circuit runs off of +1.5V, just like the FZ-1A. The problem with this is that we would need either a dedicated power supply or run it off a AA battery, and you wouldn't be able to wire up an indicator LED. So what I've done is made a board for the original, and did some digging to see how to get +1.5V from a +9V source.

What I found was that using an LM317 regulator you can get the voltage down to +1.5V with the right resistors. After doing some calculations with the regulator board you should get +1.516V. If my calculations are right, that means you can run it just like any other pedal and have an indicator LED.

Original:


With Regulator:



13 comments:

  1. The 220K on Q1 should move up a row to the base

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    1. Yep. Also in the regulator layout the link in column k should go to ground. I moved a bunch of stuff around and completely miss that they didn't move right.

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  2. BC548 have the Base in the middle pin

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    1. correct. i made the layouts for the original transistor pinout. i'm going through both layouts and making changes so that that they match the pinout of the substitutes. the 2N2923 is kind of expensive.

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    2. Do you still have the layout with the 2N2923 transistors? I'd love to see that one as I got a dozen of these transistors.

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  3. Wow...really interesting. Can this really sound anything like the Maestro FuzzTone FZ1 or anything close to it?

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  5. Found a sound clip!

    https://soundcloud.com/charge-d-a-m/fuzz-sale-sunn-buzz-2

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    1. nice. god that's a buzzy 60's psych rock & garage rock beast. for me this will definitely be a must build. looking at the schematic messing with the input and output cap value should bring a lot more range into it as well.

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  6. Just threw this together, not sure exactly what its supposed to sound like but definitely sounds thin and buzzy! Your calculations are correct +1.516V exactly. A quick and easy build.

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    1. awesome. from my understanding it's rather thin sounding, and there's a soundcloud link right above with an original one. you can up the input and output caps and it should boost the lows.

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  7. Do you still have the layout for the 2N2923 pinout? If you do, could you post it Also? Thanks.

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  8. Maybe a bit late to the game, but couldnt we just use a voltage divider with a 10k from 9v and 2k to ground to achieve the 1.5v

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