JSA Effects Just Some Fuzz (1 of 1)

A hand made, unique design, vintage style fuzz with a modern feel, built around a pair of vintage 'black hat' BC208a transistors

Fuzz is a funny ol' thing; one person's "best fuzz ever!" is another person's "bag of garbled noise!", which is why there are soooooOOOOOOOoooo many two transistor fuzzes on the market. I'm very open in how long it took me to really 'get' fuzz as an effect, but once I finally understood it and how to get the best out of it, I fell deeply in love with it and set out to build the perfect fuzz for me. It's taken several years of building, experimenting, tweaking, trying again, shouting profanities, rage quitting, trying something totally different, 100's of transistors in 1000's of arrangements, and more experimenting, but I finally got there, and thus "Just Some Fuzz" was born

Sure it's a two transistor fuzz, but this isn't a clone of anything; there is so much more to it than that:

Firstly transistor choice matters the most. I'm not exaggerating when I say I've been through 100's of transistors over the years developing it. All this experimenting narrowed down the field to a small handful of transistors, each of which sounded great, and had their own flavour. In the end this "Just Some Fuzz" uses a pair of carefully chosen 'Black Hat' BC208a's which gave the widest range of fuzz tones and cleaned up beautifully with the guitars volume control. This is then paired with some orange drop capacitors and vintage carbon comp resistors in the signal path for maximum 'mojo' (no one really knows what that actually means, but the pedal definitely sounds awesome!)

Secondly I wanted a fuzz with a tone control, but I wanted it to be able to both cut and boost treble so that, even with the fuzz control at a darker setting, you could still get a bright sound (especially when rolling your guitars volume back), and because of how the tone control works, you end up with a gentle mid hump as well, which helps mitigate the need to add a tube screamer or alike straight after it to cut through a mix. The tone control also helps if you need to use the fuzz after a buffer or wireless pack; yes it sounds best first in the chain like a classic vintage fuzz, especially in terms of how it reacts to the guitars volume & tone controls, but it also fares very well after a buffer

I also wanted a bias control with a wide sweep on it, that could take you from rough and rawkus blown out fuzz when fully left, then turning it clockwise takes you to tight and tidy strong fuzz, further clockwise is velcroy and ripping fuzz, and fully right is uper gated spitty fuzz. This took a while as it was so dependent on what transistors you used but, again, I got there in the end (the internal trimpot sets the range of the "Bias" control, so if you want less gating at the right hand side of the control, give it a few turns clockwise, and if you want it more gated earlier in the sweep, give it a few turns anticlockwise)

Then, of course, there's the sweep of the "Fuzz" control. Yes you can just dime it and work from there, but I wanted to be able to roll the fuzz control down and still get a good range of useable tones. As such, this uses a rev.log tapered fuzz control which gives a wide and smooth sweep, helping you to fine tune the fuzz to your liking

Finally I wanted a good amount of output volume. Again, you can just max the volume and have at it, but there's also a nice amount of range on it drop the volume a bit to keep things cleaner if you'd like

As with all JSA pedals, this was entirely hand built from scratch by one-man-and-his-cat in the heart of the UK. The circuit itself is enclosed in a hand painted 1590bbs with top mounted jacks, uses the 'truest bypass' true bypass footswitching, and can be powered by a normal 9v 2.1mm centre negative 'Boss style' power supply (i.e your normal power supply that you power 99% of your pedals with - you can even dasiy chain it if you like) or with a 9v battery (battery not included)