Last updated Mar 30, 2008 12:30 pm GMT-5

SlinkP Foxxtone Clone Project

Get out yer soldering irons, noise-addicts, 'cause Uncle Fix-It is gonna show you how to make your own implement of mass ear-destruction.

Well, okay, I'm just going to ramble a lot and then toss you a few measly links.

Part One: How I Joined the One True Church of the Living Foxxtone

In 1993, while momentarily distracted by a guy with sparkly gold braids playing a saxophone and claiming to be from outer space, I managed to exit a New York City subway car without remembering to pick up my toolbox from the floor. In that toolbox were all my stomp boxes.

AARGH!

Back in my then-hometown of Amherst, MA, facing the bleak prospect of living the undistorted life,I started scouting around for cheap replacements. With no suspicion of what I was getting myself into, I plunked down $40 for a beat-up old thing some guy had. It was labelled "Foxxtone Fuzz/Wah/Volume."

The volume pedal function sucked, and I immediately re-wired the bypass switch so it never turned on the volume pedal mode. The wah was pretty cool; your basic wah, but with a rotary switch that selects the range the pedal sweeps through, from amped-up cicadas to beer-swilling African bullfrogs. The star attraction, though, was the fuzz.

It's hard to describe how over-the-top this fuzz is. A bit like a Big Muff in its singing, furry, throaty grottling, but with a different character in the midrange gronk. The control labels were missing from the beat-up pedal I got, so I labelled them myself. One switch was immediately dubbed "Ugly." Which I mean in the best sense of the word. This switch throws in a squealing octave overtone. If you play chords, it freaks out and sounds a bit like a ring modulator, not in the least bit nice. The "Jimi Hendrix Octave Fuzz" does a similar thing, but the Foxxtone is more versatile. The tone control goes from deep and synth-buzzy to bite-your-head-off. It even sounds fantastic on bass guitar. The only thing it never is is subtle. The "sustain" control starts at "As Much As You Could Possibly Want" and goes up from there.

Yeah, but is it on any records?

Yes - mine! On the ARMS song "I Just Found Out," I played the Gass. The over-the-top gronky sound in the chorus is no guitar, no bass, just one track of the Gass through my Foxxtone clone. I used the same instrumentation for the choruses of Separation of Church and Spirit.
The Foxxtone's octave overtone is nicely displayed on Adrian Belew's song "Big Electric Cat". The most prominent instrument is a fretless guitar played through the Foxxtone and some echo. Sounds like it might be recorded direct to tape (no amp, no mic). I found this out when I went to a Belew show and he did a Q&A session with the audience... one question someone asked was "What the heck is a Foxx Tone Machine"? Which got Belew going off about Big Electric Cat and how "Nobody seems to like that effect except me and Jimi Hendrix." I got a kick out of this 'cause I'd just bought my original Foxxtone maybe three weeks previous.

Part Two: A Tragic Mishap

In 1996, fed up with having nowhere to live and nowhere to practice, ARMS decided to go on an unplanned tour-or-bust of the northeast. The tour part consisted of one dreary gig in a Philly coffee-house. The bust part was when we drove back to NYC and foolishly left some things in our car... my suitcase of stomp boxes, and Benson's duffel bag of drum hardware. You can guess what happened.

AAARGH AGAIN!

Part Three: Our Hero Rallies

Well, pretty soon I needed my noise fix pretty bad. Of course, the Foxxtone hasn't been made in about twenty years, so I looked into the "vintage effects" market, which is big business these days. I found a few dealers with Foxxtones advertised, going for - get this - $275 and up. Turns out mine had been missing the original fuzzy covering (a fuzzy fuzz, get it? har har) and so it wasn't worth so much. Too rich for my blood, so now what?

I'm a handy guy around the house, so I started looking around for schematics. I'd already successfully built a compressor from PAiA Electronics, I had the classic book Electronic Projects for Musicians, and I'd taken an analog electronics course in college. I couldn't figure out how on earth to fashion a wah pedal, so I concentrated on the fuzz section.

This is the kind of thing the Web is really great for. Some poking around with the usual search engines turned up "Leper's Abode," an archive of online schematics. It's moved around a bit since then, but is now here. Sure enough - the Foxxtone was there!

Note: Since then I've turned up even better Web resources, which are listed below.

Poking around at Radio Shack, I discovered that just about everything on the parts list could be had there, with the exception of the transistors. Back online, some more searching turned up an online semiconductor substitution database where you can find equivalent part numbers. Sadly, I've since lost the link and can't find this site anywhere... Anyway, it turned out that I could use the MPS-2222A, a.k.a. GE-20, or ECG-123A, or SK-3122 .... and it's available at good ol' Rat Shack.

By this time I was living in New York City again. A trip to a Canal Street fleamarket (a GREAT resource for DIY people) got me a metal case perfect for a stomp box. A couple obsessive days of bad soldering later, the damn thing worked.

Like everything I make, it's not pretty - in fact it's downright ugly - but it works. (picture here?)

Some notes for anyone attempting this project:

Don't even think about building your own effects without reading the Effects FAQ. There's a lot of really important pedal-building hints there.

I really, really wish that The Guitar Effects Oriented Page had been up when I was looking for Foxxtone information. They have two versions of the schematic there (look here , or here), and amazingly, the author, R.G. Keen, will sell you a printed circuit board for a Foxxtone clone! And he's got tons of other circuits too! And so much other D.I.Y. stuff I can't even believe it! Here is his list of stuff. update, april 2001: He doesn't seem to have the circuit boards anymore. Sad.

If you do take the masochistic perfboard approach, with this or any other effect, sketch out a few parts layouts until you find a way to fit it all into your case. Doing it with a bit of what my uncle calls "dead bug style" may help: only connect a lead to the board if necessary, otherwise things can float around and connect to eachother in the air. I did a bit of this, but be warned that it can leave you vulnerable to weird shorts if a wire should come loose and touch the case or another wire.

A problem with the Foxxtone circuit is that, due to the extreme gain involved, it really likes to bring up any 60-cycle hum in your power supply. You can solve this by running on batteries or buying a quieter power supply (for instance, those expensive BOSS ones really are a lot better than the Rat Shack 9V adapters). Or you can be a cheap bastard like me and just live with the noise. I've put in some honkin' big filter capacitors and even made a zener-diode regulator but there's still quite a bit of hum!

Soldering tip: Watch out with those 1N34A germanium diodes. I don't know if this is true of all germanium diodes, or just the Rat Shack ones, but they're really heat sensitive - it's extremely easy to break one while you're trying to solder it. I went through an entire package of ten before I got four soldered into place. You could probably substitute other kinds of diodes - even LEDs have been used in fuzzes - but it will change the character of the sound.

Another issue with home-made effects is the bypass switch. I've made a few boxes now, and I've come to the conclusion that unless you really REALLY need to have a little red LED light up when the effect's turned on, it's just too much trouble. For the Foxx-clone I tried a modified version of Craig Anderton's electronic footswitch design from E.P.F.M. The modifications were to change it from using a bipolar power supply (three connections: positive, negative, ground) to a single-end supply like you get with a common 9V adapter. It works, but there's a really big POP whenever you switch the effect in. I want to buy a plain old mechanical stomp switch and put that in instead.

If anyone knows where to find DPDT or 3PDT footswitches at reasonable prices, please mail me!

With my previous homemade boxes, I had found that bolting the circuit board to the chassis case with nuts, bolts, and spacers is a pain in the butt. This time I borrowed an idea from commercial effects boxes: I used PC-mount potentiometers from DigiKey for the controls, so the board is attached to the case by the nuts that hold the pots on. Works well. The board is pretty close to the grounded bottom of the case, so to prevent accidental short circuits, I took another idea from commercial effects - I cut a piece of stiff cardboard and stuffed it in under the circuit board. The result is sturdy enough to stomp on, but probably not as tough as some commercial units.

So how's the clone sound? I have MP3 files of "I Just Found Out" and "Separation of Church and Spirit". These recordings by my band, Arms, feature distorted choruses courtesy of my clone, which I built a few weeks prior to our first album session. The tone quite closely matches an earlier demo we made of "I Just Found Out", with the real Foxxtone.

And the moral of the story is, don't count your stitches before the birds in the hand are burned.