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Line 6 Echo Park Delay Pedal

Phuz Phace

I built this simple 4-knob fuzz pedal for a friend. There's nothing unique to my design here, with the exception of the two bias pots, which afford tremendous control over both signal headroom and character of the fuzz. Tweaking these controls yields everything from a surprisingly-clean boost to unbelievable levels of fuzz and distortion (and noise!), and everything in between.

This is a perfect project for the beginner. All of the parts can be found at SMALL BEAR ELECTRONICS, including matched pairs of germanium transistors. You can also obtain a ready-to-solder fuzz face pc board from GENERAL GUITAR GADGETS. There are only slight differences between these two circuits, which leads me to think it wouldn't be difficult to build the Phuz Phace circuit on an ordinary fuzz face pc board.

I tried BC108 and 2N2222A silicon NPN transistors in my pedal, and both types worked just fine. I recommend using sockets to install the transistors -- this prevents you from damaging the transistors when soldering, but also allows you to experiment with different transistor types.

To convert this circuit to your favorite PNP transistors, you need only to reverse the polarity of the 9 volt battery and 22uf capacitor connections. In fact, if you used a non-polarized film capacitor instead of an electrolytic, you could implement a board-mounted polarity switch to reverse the battery connections. This would allow you to swap between NPN and PNP types on the go.

To learn more about the design and modification of the real Fuzz Face, check out THIS classic paper.

2nd Party Mods

Here are some mods contributed by Jeff Foster, who built the unit pictured above. Here is a schematic with annotations provided by Jeff detailing his mods:

If you are interested in Jeff's phuz phace build, you can contact him via email:

spgjmf AT hotmail DOT com

Thanks Jeff!