The distorted guitar is the the sound of a rebellion, the sound of change, the sound of hope and the sound of dreams. It's also the sound of my youth.
The guitar has fallen out of fashion lately. It will come back. Why? Because when you feed electronic pickups into noisy, distorted and fuzzy circuitry there's a dirt, an expressiveness that is definitely human. Human may go out of fashion, as we've seen lately, but it will bounce back. When it does, the sound of a distorted guitar will be right there with it.
The first distortion from a guitar came from blues players in the late 40's and 50's tried to augment their lyrics with a complimenting dirty sound by driving small valve amplifiers hard, saturating the amp's tubes. In the 60's people started pushing transistors beyond the limit between a guitar and an amp, and the sound of youth culture was born.
To celebrate this legacy I'm going to build a distortion pedal from parts. Then I'm going to use the pedal to record by concept album called Modern Man. Since I'm not an expert in electronics I'll try to build a simple circuit.
The circuit? A Fuzz Face. The same one made famous by Jimi Hendrix when crafting his otherworldly tones in the late 60's.
It's a simple circuit. The key, it seems, to replicate the sound of the old ones is to get transistors that have the same characteristics as the ones used in the 60's. Apparently it's possible to get something very close from Russia or Eastern Europe. They have New Old Stock (NOS) of military grade Germanium transistors with very similar specs to the AC128 transistor used in the Fuzz Face. Should be interesting.
