Bettie Page Silicon Fuzz.

[Structo]

I received my Bettie Page Fuzz pedal yesterday in the mail.
Some of you may recall when I posted about this pedal when Jay offered it to Gear Pagers for a reduced Christmas price of $150.
It took him a little longer than estimated to get them built but I told him I didn't care because I wanted a good one and not to rush it out.
He did not disappoint.

This is made by Jayson at http://gaspedals.net/

He did a very nice job on this pedal. The graphic is done very well and is oversprayed with some kind of sparkly stuff.

This is a silicon fuzz pedal.
The DC jack is standard 2.1mm 9V center negative. The toggle switch is
vintage to the left and modern to the right. Tone will change a bit
when volume goes up.
So it kind of changes the feel of the tone when you flip the switch one way or the other.

The build quality is among the best I have seen inside. A very pro wiring job and a high quality pcb. He does goop his components with epoxy to deter cloners but that is fine as he has a right to keep his design to himself.
Jay and Gaspedals is best known for his Carburetor or Carb pedal which is best described as a booster or overdrive and can be used for both.

The Bettie really does sound good and has that bite and spitty nature that a silicon fuzz is known for. I also have a Analogman Sunface w/Sundial that is a Germanium fuzz. While that pedal is awesome as well it really doesn't seem to be bright enough to cut through the mix.

But, the nice thing about a Germanium fuzz pedal is, that it cleans up when you back down the guitar volume and you can almost get a clean tone if your amp is not cranked up to where you are into distortion.
With the silicon fuzz, you don't really get the clean up with the guitar volume control but that's ok, that's what the true bypass footswitch is for.

The Bettie Fuzz has a real lively tone that sounds good with either single notes or power chords. Also sounds great with single coil pickups as well as humbuckers.

For $150 I am glad I bought it and it will have a place on my pedal board.
I give it two thumbs up.[img:26:28]http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b392/ ... s/Dude.gif[/img]

[img:577:498]http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b392/ ... ettie1.jpg[/img]
[img:577:498]http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b392/ ... ettie2.jpg[/img]
[IMG:577:498]http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b392/ ... ieguts.jpg[/img]

[Ronsonic]

Bettie!

Pretty pedal, nice clean work. Gotta love it.

[flood]

looks nice and solid, but i hate goop with a vengeance.

well built and nice artwork too though.

EDIT: Tom, would you mind if i repost those pictures on another forum?

[Structo]

This is what Jayson of Gaspedals had to say about the gooping.

Yeah its hard these days with the gooping. If I don't find a way to protect my little tweaks there is any number of DIY kids with soldering irons ready to just copy them and sell the same pedal or their version for half the price. I'm having enough trouble trying to get gaspedals to be profitable but if I have to charge $100 a pedal (which is what DIYers would like to see) Ill just have to do something else.\

I would rather you copy the pictures and host them elsewhere as I am on a limited bandwidth hosting site.
You can use them, just host them on your own site.

[flood]

don't mean to derail this thread, but just my two cents:

a. the kids with soldering irons will not pay for boutique pedals anyway, either due to the fact that they simply can't afford them (me) or for reasons of practicality (e.g. why buy a Landgraff overdrive for $$$ when you can get pretty much the same sound out of a modded tube screamer? the last couple of % accuracy do not matter to solder jockeys).

b. people who buy boutique pedals (in general) do not want to waste time building their own stuff when a quality product is available on the market.

c. the value addition of a boutique pedal, as in the case of this pedal, comes from a few factors: durability, sound and the finished package. i haven't heard this pedal yet, will give it a listen when i have a decent connection - but the build quality and finishing are top notch and not something that the average cloner can provide. these things matter to a buyer. i've seen innards of boutique pedals that were horrendous, really.

d. there are only so many ways to distort a signal.... as far as i can tell, practically every overdrive/fuzz pedal on the market is based off a few commercial classics. notable exceptions are devi ever (way too weird), crowther prunes and custard and the klon centaur, these actually do something a bit different.

jayson does have a right to not want to have cloners redo his work - but honestly, with the veritable plethora of silicon fuzz schematics on the net, who give's a monkey's? if there is someone hell bent on REing his design, it can be done - goop can be removed and the circuit can be traced. i really can't see people touting $30 knockoffs of a pedal that i've (maybe it is just me) never heard of. the chinese clones on the market are practically all based on commercial classics, the ibanezes, bosses, whathaveyounots.

i really acknowledge e.g. skreddy's attitude, who acknowledges that his circuits are based on BMPs and talks freely about part values.

just my 2 cents... i don't mean offense to anyone, least of all the builder. i simply find it a flawed thinking process that boutique builders are going to lose significant business to cloners. with all the fuzz factory cloning happening, people with the moolah are still buying it from zvex himself. the people without the moolah wouldn't have anyway, unless they got rich and had the moolah suddenly unless of course, the pedal is so gorundbreaking, that cloning would not be a possibility but a surety...

[Alexo]

If I could just sell two more fuzz factory clones, I'd finally have enough money to get myself a real one!!
[kidding, I don't really sell clones. What's the fun in that?]


I think that the best advertizing for an amp or a pedal is letting someone play it - think how many more people are turned on to the Marshall 18 watt by plugging into their crazy friend's clones. Yes, many of these people will buy clones instead of Marshall (clones) but it's giving Marshall some great indy/viral branding (the holy grail of current marketing trends) and it only raises their reputation. If they wanted to, Marshall is in a position to build the definitive 18 watt clone that puts the others to shame and price it accordingly, although this is not exactly what they have chosen to do. Even so, many people trust the name so much that they want the "real" thing and they cough up the 2 G's.

However, we do live in the real world, and if a designer has to hide his circuits in order to make a living, he has every right to do so, and I will absolutely respect that decision. ...although nothing will make the DIY community more curious about a circuit than coating it in goop.

EDIT: It is a little ironic though - I bet the builder didn't pay to license that photo of Bettie Paige. Sure looks good though!

[Structo]

Maybe it is original artwork.

Hey if you want to chisel epoxy off a small handful of components be my guest.

Take for example, I built a pedal a couple weeks ago.
I bought a pcb that a Dyna Comp or Ross style compressor could be built on. The Ross using about four more caps and a few resistors.
I decided to build both on the same board with a switch to choose between the two.
I also included a three way switch that you can select three different recovery modes, from fast to slow.

The pcb cost me around $20. I could make one but for $20 I'll pay.
The components cost $28 including a powder coated Hammond enclosure.
So there is roughly $50 in parts. Taking into account my time if I sold it for $100, I would be making about $10 per hour....
Not very lucrative, sure I could buy in bulk and shave some dollars on the parts outlay but to make a living building pedals, I tip my hat to anybody that can do it.

At the Gear Page, people are willing to drop $200 on each swirly painted rendition as soon as somebody says it has Moj0.

Just sayin'.....

Here's my Dyna/Ross Comp

[IMG:720:576]http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b392/ ... nished.jpg[/img]

[Alexo]

Nice!

[flood]

WOW! tom, that is some beautiful work, and i think it's worth more than $100 if you take into account the effort involved... i would like to point out though that PCBs work out a LOT cheaper in larger order quantities (which is no secret to you... i'm just a master of the obvious ).

TGP... the amount of money paid on that site for "mojo" and "bowteek" pedals boggles the mind... some serious issues over there.

anybody heard of the clay jones overdrive debacle? a boutique swirled pedal that commanded prices as high as $1500 on ebay and was little more than a tube screamer with a burr brown opamp, LED clipping and GrandLaff values?

it's quite amazing how you can drop more on an generic TS/Rat/BMP/SD1 clone these days than on a decent sounding all-tube amp like the valve jr or blackheart....

[benoit]

How'd you accomplish the sweet lettering?

Here's my Dyna/Ross Comp

[IMG:720:576]http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b392/ ... nished.jpg[/img]

[Structo]

Thanks for the compliments guys.
The labeling was done by making waterslide decals on my inkjet printer and Testers inkjet decal paper.

I print them out then spray a couple coats of lacquer over them to protect the ink from water.

Then I cut out and applied the decals.

I then buried the decals under at least 8 coats of Deft clear gloss nitro lacquer.
Wet sanded and polished it looks like that.

I need to find some better decal paper though.
The Testers brand seems to have a problem with being cloudy under them after they dry.
There are a couple online places that sell high quality waterslide paper that I want to try.

The insides are not quite as neat as I would have liked.
The enclosure was a bit small and I really had to shoe horn everything in there.
The Ross/Dyna switch is a 4PDT that has 4 caps on it so it was kind of bulky.

I socketed the transistors in case I wanted to try different ones.
I ended up using the 2N5088's because they are low noise/ high gain.
I should try some lower gain ones to see if it sounds any better.
The level control acts as a booster and can actually overdrive my preamp with these transistors.

[IMG:800:600]http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b392/ ... G_0247.jpg[/img]