How to Modify a Dunlop Jimi Hendrix Signature Fuzz Face (Fuzz Face History)

on today's episode I'm gonna teach you how to do my favorite modifications to the Hendrix fuzz-face by Dunlop you can buy the pedal you can mod it you can do anything [Music] before we start modifying the circuit let's talk about its history where it came from and why that matters some time in London 1964 a Vox engineer by the name of dick Denis creates a prototype fuzz circuit and puts it in a small tin case he wants Vox to release something like the maestro fuzz tone so he takes this prototype to the owner of Vox mr. Jennings and says hey let's put this on our line people will buy it mr. Jennings does not like fuzz he does not like distortion and he says no but about a year later Vox releases the v8 1:6 distortion booster unit and dick says this is his circuit the exact same circuit that he had prototype in the tin enclosure so apparently dick won and mr. Jennings lets Vox release a buzz circuit now this is where it gets interesting next door to Vox is Macar ease and Gary Hurst is the engineer there he invents the tone bender and then there's a tone bender 1.5 version this isn't 66 it's the exact same circuit as the vox v8 1:6 distortion boost that dick designed to even further this story gary Hearst assisted dick and they work together at Vox for quite some time so whose idea was it where did it come from and does that really matter probably not but the story is the prototype turned into the Vox eight one six the Vox eight when six was then used by Gary Hurst to do the tone bender 1.5 and then I ever arbiter across town takes that exact same topology of those circuits and puts it in a circular enclosure and calls it the fuzz face this is 1966 that's when Hendrix arrives and that's the fuzz choice of Hendrix becomes to London sees the new fuzz face adopts that pedal and that's why we're modernist that's why there's a signature version and that's why it's really important to know when you learn to do this mod there's a lot of other circuits that use this top and the mods will work so you're not just learning how to modify space you're learning how to modify a legendary fuzz circuit let's get started the version of the fuzz face that were modifying this Hendricks Signature Edition already sounds fantastic and it's already modified this circuit is basically using the specs and values that Roger mayor would have changed in Hendrix's original arbiter fuzz phases we know that all of Hendrix's gear was modified by Roger and Rogers shared those values and Dunlop is putting them in this edition so this is a killer pedal it sounds great it has high-quality parts inside and it's a hundred and forty-nine dollars I mean it's great as is but you can buy it you can do this mod and have a lot of fun so let's look at the circuit on a white board and understand what we're about to do know it's time for circuit then the first thing to notice about this circuit or any other fuzz face style circuit is that it contains two transistors they're labeled q1 and q2 on the schematic and the transistor is an amplifier so we have one amplifier amplifying the guitar signal and slamming it into another and this is creating that beautiful distortion fuzz let's look at the circuit walk through each part and I'll show you the mods we're gonna do our guitar is the input do you strum a chord or a note and it goes first into a 2.2 capacitor so this can be changed we're not gonna mess with it because I like the 2.2 but if you wanted to play around and make it more like the tone bender 1.5 or more like the 8 1 6 you can adjust this up or down you can go to 5uf for more bass or you make it smaller than a 2.2 you can go down and do a point 1 or 0.01 and you can get into like treble booster sounds but yeah that's what that's for it's fun you can do that later and it's easy to change on the circuit board we first go into this q1 now through the cap into that transistor and we go into the base the emitter is to ground and the collector you have network of resistors here you have a 20k and you have a VR one trim pot now this VR one is so the factory workers that are building this at Dunlop can take a screwdriver and adjust this trim pot exactly where they need it on a multimeter and leave it not to be touched but we want to mod it we're gonna pull the 20k out we're gonna pull VR one out and we're gonna replace these with a one mag potentiometer that we're gonna leave in the case but you can easily turn with your hands and then adjust this whole setting and that's going to be awesome because you get to adjust the bias of the q1 transistor and it's really fun trust me now as we go into the base we've also split off down here as we're coming out of this collector we're going into the base of the next transistor and then out of that emitter and you have this entire network here which is causing the distortion setting it's causing the gain of these transistors doing a lot of things but what we want to mess with is this 1k potentiometer that's the fuzz pot when you're looking at the fuzz face and you turn the fuzz control it's this 1k control I'm not a huge fan of this potentiometer I think it's kind of pointless because just turn your fuzz all the way up and use your guitar volume to make the fuzz more clean that's what I do that's what most people have always done so let's pull this out let's basically fix it at 1k it's just always there and then we're gonna go up here and q2 has that same trimmer Network so you can set the bias of q2 we're gonna pull out VR 2 we're gonna leave the 3-point 1k but we're gonna pull out the trimmer and we're gonna put a 10 KB external pot on this trimmer for the bias of q2 it's gonna go where the old fuzz control was and you're gonna have a a lot more fun so fix fuzz all the way roll off your guitar for cleans but your troll is now an external bias control for q2 if you want to mess with the point one kind of a similar thing as the two point two you can filter out smaller caps cut off more low and larger caps let more low end through and then the last month we're gonna do we're going to take out the 470 K volume potentiometer we're gonna replace it with a 500 KB this is gonna give you much more powerful output perceived volumes gonna be better and you won't have to turn up the volume control all the way let's dive in but first to stare at the schematic it's really cool just stare at it it's not weird I'll do it with you it's so nice you're gonna need some tools like a soldering iron solder needle nose pliers wire strippers screwdrivers sockets or wrenches solder braid solder sucker the parts are gonna need are a 500 kb potentiometer a 10 KB potentiometer and a 1 Meg C potentiometer you're also gonna need some wire a cup or a parts tray for holding the parts you removed because if you lose them that's gonna really steam hot glue and hot glue gun or some 3m tape be sure that your soldering properly I recommend you watch some videos in practice because it's really important or you could ruin the circuit board so we put a link in the description below of a really good tutorial also take your time don't get in a hurry if you get in a hurry you'll regret it you might ruin the pedal it won't be as fun just take your time you're welcome here's the sound of the Hendrix fuzz face just like it comes out of the box it's awesome but I'm going to demonstrate it just so you know what to compare to you later on today I'm gonna be demonstrating the pedal with my Nystrom Telecaster model guitar and an early nineties you need fender blues Deluxe totally set clean a little bit of reverb [Music] now let's listen to the mods so you can hear some of the crazy sounds you're gonna be able to get out of this pedal when you're finished [Music] [Applause] [Music] step one to the mod is to remove all the hardware and prep things we need to remove the backplate by removing the Philips head screw in the center you want to remove the knobs with a small flat-head screwdriver simply turn those screws to the left and the knobs come right off and then notice there is a plastic washer or two I've modded a few of these and it just depends so you're gonna need one of these later so put it in your parts tray as well now we want to remove the hardware that holds the potentiometer these into the enclosure so we want to remove these brass nuts right here and we're gonna use a 1/2 inch socket I'm using this guy love it there's a link below just gonna turn it left loosen them up and you can finish this with your hands pull this off and you'll notice there's a washer now those potentiometers come off on the inside you're gonna notice a star washer like this a little lock washer I'm gonna just put that aside as well let's also remember to put our hardware into the dish because if it can it will fall in the floor or your dog will eat it label those pots for your memory it'll be worth it just take a sharpie put an F on the fusspot and a V on the volume now unscrew the two Phillips head screws from the PCB so that we can get underneath it and remove things add things and do the work we need to do you're gonna notice there is a brown wire that's in the screw and then it pops out just remember to put that back what it does is it actually is a ground component so you're gonna put that in there and it's put it back later and tighten it down and that's very very important for the circuit it helps with noise step 2 is to change the 470 K pot on the volume over to a 500 KB this allows the volume pot to be more powerful you won't have to turn up the volume all the way like you do on a standard fuzz face now a few things I fur in a fuzz face to use a bigger 24 millimeter pot I think they're just bigger and cooler but it's you know it's hard times I'm in my basement shops are closed so in quarantine I'm gonna use a normal 16 millimeter be 500 K and it'll work and we're gonna make it work with a little trick now it's really tempting to unsolder these wires that are on the three legs of this pot because we know we're pulling this out but let's not do that because we want to remember where they go and we want to make this modification as simple as possible so what we're gonna do is we're actually just gonna take this with the hardware removed and we're gonna insert it into the hole the plot there for that and we're gonna Center it we're gonna put our finger on put some pressure and then we flip it over and just kind of Center it up it's not the same style pot it's a little too small but actually with this little hack here take that plastic washer we saw a few of those on the old ones let's just shove that down on there so you need to press it down turn it as though it is a nut it'll eventually work its way in and that's gonna keep this area kind of filled now you got that on there and then we put the metal washer and then we put the nut from the actual pot we're using tighten it down with your fingers first and then we want to take the number-10 socket or wrench whatever you have and you just want it to kind of point in you don't want the lugs over here you need them basically point these three lugs down to the foot switch we'll do that on the other pot as well just picture a triangle here so now that that's in we're gonna hold it in place so it can't slide and we're gonna tighten that down now we want to remove one wire at a time from this pot and place it on the corresponding leg of the other pot so let's do this guy the brown on lug one so pots late pot labeling is one two three you go across it one two and three we're gonna do leg one is Brown and we're gonna put it on that load one so I'm just gonna hold it in this hand pretty simply take my soldering iron eat this just lay the soldering iron on here and that wire is essentially gonna fall out and now when they make sure these wires are pushed aside make sure those lugs are straight one's a little bit I straighten it up you might want to take your wire strippers and do a fresh little strip of the wire take that put it through there I'll just bend it around it just helps the stay in place like that heat the lug up apply some solder so there's the first wire soldered on lug to is a blue wire here that is actually the output of the fuzz circuit so let's switch it out again just heat it up and it pulls right out last wire on that old original volume pot is lugg 3 1 2 3 so this is leg 3 it's purple there we go just take the old pot and do this put one of the stars down on it put your normal washer that was on there and then just screw on your net what this is good for is just keep this you never know you might want to return it to stock and that way you have all the hardware this is very specific hardware so take that put it aside you might need it one day now let's put this on here alright we have successfully soldered in a new 500 KB potentiometer step 3 is to remove the original fusspot and mount it internally like I said it's kind of useless let's leave it all the way up but we'll always have it there if we want to mess with it simply mount it inside with some hot glue or two layers of 3m tape you can't use just one layer because it's too thin but pot actually pokes out a bit on the back so two layers will cover the whole back of the pot making it a really good connection point with the case and it won't fall out the next step is step four where we need to replace this fuzz spot that we've made internal it's gonna be behind the backplate and just leave it fixed we need to give this an external fuzz control and so what we're gonna do is we're actually gonna modify this circuit to where we can put control for the bias on the outside and that's one of my favorite controls for a fuzz face so what first thing is let's take a be 10k pot and remove the hardware pots have little tabs on them and I don't know if I mentioned it last time but sometimes you have to break that tab off like that because I don't have everything I need here at the house I'm not at the normally I would use pots like this that actually have lugs to put your wire through and solder even smaller versions of that like I used a minute ago the only beats inkay I have is actually a PCB mounted pot that's very different so what I did is I just kind of crudely snipped it off with wire cutters and I'm gonna solder down into that it's fine it works it's not the greatest thing but it'll last let's put that down here remember point it away so you have the PCB here so when I make sure to kind of point it away like that let's Center it on the outside just like the other pot remember those plastic washers put it down on there like that so there's the new fuzz pot it's actually a biased pot but it it feels like fuzz and you'll see that when you play it now we need to wire up something to these three lugs so let's do that so on the back of this circuit board we're gonna find a labeling that says VR 2 VR 2 is this little guy it is a small trim pot meaning you can take a screwdriver and insert it and turn that screwdriver now the problem is its internal they set it at the factory to a certain setting which I'll explain later and these break if you play with them enough so we're actually gonna remove this and this is a surface mount part now it's not too crazy nothing too complicated but basically you have three pads where this little tiny part is soldered to this board there's a pad at the bottom right here there's one up here and one over here so 1 2 3 we're gonna apply heat right here and with the tip of the soldering iron just flip it up like this just apply heat right there it'll melt the solder and then you just want to flip it up there you go it raised up off the board and now we just want to heat these back pieces the back pads and then it fell right off now we have these positions for vr-2 we have this pad this pad in this pass so we're gonna solder wire on there you need two pieces of wire I have a couple here that are 4 inches long and these are from the shop I have a bunch here when I'm doing bread boarding but they're just priests stripped and 4 inches is a great length so we're gonna use two of those so you might want to take your wire strippers and just fix you some wire now that we've removed that part let's solder these wires onto the pot that we put into place we're gonna solder to like two and like three so let's for me I'm gonna insert these wires right there [Music] all right now we have those two wires soldered into place we're gonna solder the other ends to the circuit board holding a circuit board is really weird I have these little legs that clip onto things so I'm gonna clip this here but you can have a friend hold it you can figure out some other method whatever you need to do one of those wires is gonna solder to the top left pad of the three so there's this this and this we're gonna do that top left and then the other wire to the bottom single so nothing Sauter's to the top right side so just keep in mind the top left and the bottom single it doesn't matter which wire goes where so I'm just gonna put those wires here and I'm gonna add a little solder to the end of each one just to help it out when you're soldering onto the surface mount now when you're soldering to the surface mount you just want to do it quickly and you want it to stick and it will be good enough so let's do this first one here and I'm gonna take I'm gonna take some pliers cuz it's just helpful for me I'm gonna hold the end of that one wire with pliers like this and I'm gonna take my soldering iron and the solder that's on the pad and that I just added to the wire will be enough to make this a really good hold so I'm gonna heat it up hold it really still done let's do the other one so we're gonna solder this to that top left I'm gonna heat the pad heat the wire hold it really still done a really good move for these is to take if you have it that hot glue gun just because these parts are so small just put a dab of hot glue on there and like smush it down just like that and that helps just any friction you might have there we have finished we have an external fuzz bias we're just gonna call it the fuzz pot but we all know it's bias it's a secret this external bias control in the place of the fuzz control is really useful the stock voltage setting for the internal biases is 4.5 volts this is what every fuzz face is usually set to if you go above or below that you have a lot of different sounds you can get some more powerful kind of gated sounds you could have more saturated distortion sounds there's just a whole lot more that happens when you have this q2 bias adjustment on the outside for your fuzz control step 5 is to replace the 20k resistor and the VR one variable trimmer on the collector of q1 with a 1 Meg C taper pot this is gonna be awesome it's gonna let you adjust the bias and voltage just like we did on q2 but on q1 and this is really fun because you get to play with how that first transistor is acting and it's gonna make you to react and it's gonna give you all kinds of new sounds that were not available so the first thing we need to do is locate VR 1 now VR 1 is this trimmer so we removed added wires and glued some of us glued that trimmer so now we are removing this guy so the same process we're going to take our soldering iron and we're gonna heat that front pad and we're just gonna lift it up then we're gonna heat the other collects data there it is it's itty bitty so we've removed this trim pot but we need this the current of the circuit to still flow so normally it flows in here into the trim pot and out so we want to just jump across these top two we're gonna lay the leg or a piece of wire anything conductive and just solder it across here so I'm gonna use my little Doc Ock tool I'm going to dab on a little bit of solder to those top pads you actually could just bridge them with solder but I want to I just did I want to be really sure so I want to just take the leg of this resistor lay it on there and let the solder flow so that leg is going across the top two pads then I take my clippers and just clip it off a lot of the resistor left you can still use it in a circuit you didn't waste anything the next thing we want to do is remove this resistor now on the back side you'll see a label that says R to see this label R - now we want to remove the resistor and the leg is here and here so we're gonna desolder we're gonna heat this up and we're gonna lay our solder braid on it or use a solder sucker watch one of the videos on the internet about how to do that if you don't know how and we're gonna pull that part out so I'm gonna take my doc ock hand and use my solder sucker here I'm gonna heat that till I see smoke coming out and the solder is smooth and then I just removed solder I'm gonna do it a few more times let it set make sure it's shiny and you can see that it's melted suck it out again let's do it a third time I still see solder you should see all the way through the board when it's completely clean you should be able to see light from the other side that's pretty solid and then we're going to do the same thing on the other side of our two so our two kind of jumps across where that old trimmer was and then it's actually two things are soldered here but we're just gonna remove the solder that looks good let's remove doc ock and see if that resistor just pulls out oh that was satisfying came right out but uh so that resistor is not needed anymore but I would keep it maybe in a little baggie or something we need a couple more pieces of wire four inch stuff we're gonna take the wire and we're gonna insert it into those pads where the resistor was just like this we're gonna need to take our fingers and hold that in place flip it over and you should see the legs coming out of those pads and then you just want to solder it so this is really helpful when you have like one of these third hand little little doc doc things say I do that there's all kinds of methods get creative a little piece of advice is when you go to solder these make sure obviously it's a good solder joint on this one you've inadvertently unsoldered some of this pad as well just make sure it all heats up real nice the next step is to mount the PCB back on to these standoffs here we had two Phillips screws when you're mounting the circuit board don't forget this ground ring you just want to put it underneath here come down with the circuit board and screw it on fasten them down you got two wires coming out of the top and now those wires need to be mounted to a new control and I want to take AC one Meg pot now this is a very large potentiometer value this is a very strange mod I'm unaware of anyone else doing it but I love it there are B and a tapers the C works way better for this now I'm gonna once again use one of these rigged pots where I've clipped off the legs it is what it is but hopefully you have ordered something nice like this right before we solder our two wires to the pot let's go ahead and mount the pot here now you can do the 3m tape like this or you can do the glue let's just put a DAB right here a dab will do you see one egg let that dry and all we're gonna do is we're gonna solder these wires just like we did to the other potentiometer over here we're gonna solder it on to lug two and three remember we just glued the pot down so loved one is here so this is two and three so you just need to solder to these so if a pot is upside down like this it goes one two three if a pot is right side up it goes one two three it's very important because that would be how it turns and you don't want this to turn backwards so let's take one of our wires here does it matter which one put a little bit of solder on the tip of both actually tin it a little bit it helps out especially with these pots I'm using and we're gonna hold this down and soldered [Music] all right now that those are soldered you can kind of tidy it up I'm gonna do this where I kind of tuck it and bend it under the circuit board like such when this pot is down it's at one volt it's kind of the stock setting when you max this pot out you end up around eight volts on this first transistor and it completely shuts off but the way this one meg C pot works if you barely back off you actually go from eight to around 3.5 volts and that's where some interesting magic happens some fun gated sounds and then from where you hear it turn on all the way down to the one volt it's all fun and it's all good after you've completed the modification and you have this pot where you want it like I said I leave this maxed out maybe some of you guys are strange and you want to move that it's up to you this pot you know put it where you want it I kind of have a spot I like it in once that's done let's put the back plate on we take it and with the jacks pointing up fuzz-face goes right under it so you take your back plate kind of hold the screw in and you're wanting to basically have it go right down into that center hole which can be a little tricky though I did it though no Ted I step seven is a must you've mounted a pedal you got to pick out some cool knobs in the description below I'll show you where you can order some you might have some laying around or you might just keep the stock ones either way try some different knobs it's really fun step eight is to sign it with your name put the date that you finished it and be really really proud of this you modded a pedal and not just any pedal a deeply historically significant circuit you kind of know how it works now you can order some different versions of this you can play around you can experiment you're now an accomplished pedal modifying expert maybe not an expert but you're good at this you did it now that we've modified the fuzz I'm gonna turn that VR one all the way down that's gonna be around one volt and the bias and then we're gonna crank up VR to all the way that external fuzz control that we now have so check it out [Music] I'm gonna turn vr1 all the way up and right in that area where you back it off and it's just turning back on its a really great spot around 3.5 volts on the bias and I'm just gonna play with the new external fusspot the VR 2 [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] now I want to show you how much louder and more powerful the new modified version is I'm going to use my switchback device to switch between them both I have a little small foot switch on the back of the amp there you'll see my hand go down when I hit that the light will go between green and red when you see the switchback light is green that's the stock version of the fuzz with the black knobs and then you'll see it go to red if I hit the switch again and it'll be the modified version with the gray knobs now I'm gonna put those volumes at noon and show you how drastic it is in comparison the last demo example I want to give here is how they both react to me rolling off the volume of the guitar this is super important to me and it should be to you on any good fuzz-face is that when you roll the volume back it cleans up the tone and gives you all kinds of options just at your fingertips so that's really important we'll do the same set up you can see how they both respond to that guitar volume control [Music] you [Music] a couple other optional things you might want to do is to buy one of the voodoo lab battery clip adapters this lets us not have to drill into the case anymore but simply add on that adapter snapping it onto the battery clip and then just run it out of the back underneath the plate we put that in the description below so you can order one another thing you might want to do is experiment with other NPN silicon transistors so it's really important that when you're looking for these on ebay or wherever just type in NPN silicon transistor you can pop some different ones in just remember how you remove the originals take some photos with your smartphone make sure you cover the basis of how you will forget things trust me you will try different transistors they have different sounds and that's a really fun easy and relatively inexpensive mod and lastly don't forget that this works on tons of pedals tons of fuzz face pedals tons and tons thousands of pedals you can now mod really you're that good this week's record time is brought to you by 2012 deep-sea diver history speaks now I showed another record of hers on a previous record time but this is kind of her debut record she's amazing I'm a huge fan and we actually have an episode filmed with her and it's gonna air soonish but go check this out I'm a huge fan of how she uses fuzz I love the sound of her riding I love the drum sounds on these records I love it all you need to check it out and just check out all of her records but this one's really cool because it's her in an early stage and it's a little more raw and I love the distortion tones thanks so much for watching this I hope you enjoyed it I hope you learned some stuff I'm gonna give away two of these I have the boxes they're brand new I just opened them to mod them this is the first one where I set up one night and basically wrote out this mod and play in the episode and then this is the second one that I modded it is the one that you saw in this actual episode so I'm gonna give away there's a link in description below if you're watching this you can win it directly from the show here that's gonna be for this one and then this one that's used in the video I'm gonna give it away at the JHS you know patreon page so if you're a member of the patreon if you're a patron to the show thanks very much you can win this if you're not go check it out it's really cool it supports our travelling and archiving history all the interviews I do all the documentary work that we're working on and we'll give this to you it's awesome I do a monthly long-form talk on a subject that I'm studying so you get extra content there's giveaways like this there's discounts there's a lot of fun stuff there's also the ghs show.com you can buy posters and shirts you can get this shirt which says eclipsed by fuzz I mean that's necessary there's a buzz face spaceship coming out of the sky so that's cool go check that out hit like subscribe to the channel click the bell icon for notifications of future episodes and have a wonderful day stay safe I'm here in my basement you're probably at home in your basement but now we can modify fuzz pedals yeah bye bye

Channel: JHS Pedals

Views: 147,772

Rating: 4.9582367 out of 5

Keywords: JHS, JHS Pedals, Guitar, Guitar Pedals, Electric Guitar, Guitar Effects, Guitar Player, Guitar Playing, Pedal Demo, Guitar Demo, New Pedals, New Guitar Pedals, Josh Scott, Guitar Gear, Music Gear, Guitar Tones, Pedal Tones, Good Guitar Tone, Best Guitar Tone, Best Electric Guitar Tone, Analog Guitar Tone, Guitar Sounds, JHS Guitar Pedals, JHS VLOG, JHS Videos, The JHS Show, Music History, Music, Education, Effects

Id: ghxwcSiY7GQ

Length: 41min 27sec (2487 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 24 2020