Making The Super Fucker, Pt. 2

Well, that was easy enough. Aside from one rather drastic mistake on my part, the Super Fucker Mk. 1 was really easy to build. The only problem I had is that I didn’t leave enough clearance between the switch and the case for the battery. I was only off by about 2mm, but it’s all the distance in the world in this case. I won’t make that mistake twice.

And how does it sound? Let me just say that whoever designed the original circuit knew what the fuck they were doing. I don’t know how different my changes make it sound from the orignal circuit, as I never built that, but it sounds _really_ good as is. My changes involve swapping the 2.7K resistor with a 2.2K, using germanium diodes instead of the recommended ones, and using 2N2222A metal can transistors instead of the 2N5088 on the schematics.

I tried a lot of different transistor pairs before settling on the 2222A. I found a couple combinations that sounded more or less the same, and one combo that sounded markedly better, but the output was too low. Adam has a suggestion for increasing the gain, so I’m going to try that on the next one, with the other transistor pair.

And since you’re curious now, here’s an MP3, which I hope you’ll listen to with the understanding that I’m not the world’s greatest guitar player. The chain is Parker Fly on neck+middle, to the Super Fucker, to a TL Audio tube pre, straight in to my MOTU 896. I’m using Amplitude on the 800 Clean preset. The first little riff is without the pedal, then with.