Nowt New Under The Sun

It's funny, trying to come up with some designs for new guitar effects as basically (and I am thinking fuzz in the main here) there are so many variations already out there, that how you could possibly know that the 'great new fuzz sound' you've come-up with hasn't already been created elsewhere is beyond me?

Given a world with an infinite number of guitar monkeys with soldering irons, they can't all be writing Hamlet, if you see what I mean.

And having given this some thought, basically, I can't see that it matters. Sound and tone are personal (and like colour I'm still not convinced we all hear or see the same thing anyway) and taste more so.

What perhaps does matter more is how you create the sound and the way circuits are put together, the components used. There are two schools on the components which come down to one question, to use 'original' Germanium transistors or not. Other than that, 99% of components in a fuzz are hardly that interesting.

So yay or nay? Again, I don't think it matters too much, another matter of taste, but the Germaniums do seem to sound different, like valve amps versus solid state. Myself, well so far I've not used them, but I'm going to give them a go this week, so we will see.

On the circuits, again I can't imagine anybody these days is coming up with anything fuzzy that is truly original unless they are adding features or tighter tone controls or hotter boosters, but even then it is just tinkering and the law of diminishing returns will surely cut in. The basic fuzz circuit won't change too much. And these days it is so easy to find so many circuits out there. There are loads of web sites with schematics and layouts that you can use easily enough and try. Many of them (most of them) are clones of 'famous' pedals,and in some cases the only way to get your hands on one without flogging a limb, but there are a few scattered around that claim to be original. All of which is why I've deliberately not claimed our Sophie's Filthy Boots to be anything other than my interpretation of what a fuzz should be. My tuppence, as it were. I'm sure somebody, somewhere will have produced the same sound using the same components in a similar layout, but there we are. (Some dizzy whore, 1800 & 4)

It is funny though (and what prompted this Boxing Day whimsy) but I was reading somewhere about a fuzz some bloke had built, where the board layout was posted. He was claiming it as an original (as we know a dangerous game, I think) when even I could recognise it as a straight lift from one of the more obvious schematic sites. The really funny thing was that his schematic had been laid out using the rather brilliant DIY Layout Creator software, and the one that may have, err, influenced him is in that piece of software's own library of layouts.

Now, to be fair it may be a coincidence, as I have said about monkeys above, and in general terms I think anybody playing with building effects will do as I have and spend a lot of time looking at other people's work and trying to understand how they work, and maybe how you can improve them before coming up with your own variation, but even so it made me smile to read the bluster.