Human Gear Animato Schematic

[Crowella]

boosting treble right before the low pass filter??? all the muff stages are coupled with 470n. I think it actually sounds great on bass with clean blend but totally meh on guitar. this pedal is basically the opposite of conventional wisdom of low pass clip low pass clip tone stack example pharaoh, muff etc... I think the topology would work great if you reworked the frequency response of each stage. for the switch I would suggest 200R or 0R for R18. R17 is not needed IMO. C11 could be slightly larger to make this pedal less strange.

Exactly. This pedal has a lot of potential to be tuned and I think it could definitely be salvaged to work better with guitar or standalone on bass. Interestingly, C12 was accidentally written as 22uF and it ended up sounding closer to a traditional Big Muff, just with more sustain, so if you want to mod it to let more lows through the first stage, that's a good place to start by swapping that value around.

Good luck with these cloning endeavour.

For me though, the gain structure and germanium sound is part of the tone, and thats where the mystique and "mojo" for this pedal resides.
I listened to the clips and didnt think they were close enough, so if I were gonna make one id be testing PNP and NPN Ge pairs.

It's a shame you didn't think they were close enough as I think at this point you're the only one to mention that as the case. Would you be able to expand on that a little bit? It would be interesting to hear where you think the sound isn't close enough because I'm more than happy to see what I can do with it. I can definitely confirm that they are not 100% identical but the margin of difference in my book is at the point where it'll convince most when A/B'd and it'll fool pretty much everyone if you didn't have an original to compare to.

Anyway, I do definitely recommend Ge pairs if you are choosing to build it for yourself irrespective of what I've chosen to do because it does make it more authentic and there is no way on earth I can deny that since they are physically different beasts. I'm just in a situation personally where Ge transistors are close to "unobtanium" and not financially viable (I am a uni student, hence uni budget). If you do go silicon, the two positives are less noise and more gain, with the latter actually being more useful for the first stage as it allows passive/lower output instruments to become a bit more useful with the pedal.

Going to look for some Ge transistors today. I'll stick with the silicon in the builds unless I love the germs so much I have to spread it around.

EDIT: Got a hold of a small number of AC128's at a ridiculously good price (well... comparatively speaking). If that hybrid sounds closer, I'm going to use those in the build. Obviously closer is better.

[eatyourguitar]

funny that you mention the 22uf thing. I was gonna suggest 22uf like a fuzz face but if you look up the reactance it is basically much lower impedance than 2uf. the 200R mod or 22uf mod do almost the same thing. they both increase gain for the input stage but they do it differently. decreasing the emitter resistor is closer to the original that is why I did not suggest to change the 2uf. maybe use an ON-OFF-ON switch there to ground the 22uf or ground the 200R. the 22uf should be more fuzzy distortion and the 200R should be more regular distortion.

[Crowella]

Yeah that is true. The 22uF does indeed make it sound closer to a fuzz, as I learned from using it (increasing the AC flow to ground, similar to what can be achieved by parallel resistors). I did a quick sim and the 200R idea does sound like a neat idea. Take notes people. However, not as neat as increasing C11. I think that's overall a better idea if you want to introduce more mids into the mix so thank you heaps for bringing that up.

I was about to mention that potential mod after playing around in LTSpice but saw you mentioned it, so thank you

[Crowella]

Bump. Build time has commenced! Oh god, what did I get myself into.

I have got the sound a lot closer by tweaking the trimpot to just about the right setting. Obviously cannot get it 100% but it seems like the lower trim settings with the silicon pair gets it pretty much bang on.



And an internal shot because I managed to squeeze it in. This photo makes it look a lot messier than it is. I think I'll go to board mounted pots for future builds.