Scarab Bender

Project overview

Heavy moded Silicon Tone bender MKII designed by John Lyons of Basic Audio. Capable of delivering trademarks Tone benders tones full of sustain and gain while also being versatile enough to craft your own gritty and fat tones through their bias, fat, and tone control, respectively.

Introduction

If you are looking for a Tone Bender that jack of all trades the Scarab bender is for you!

This pedal is a go for heavy riffing and ripping leads, but versatile enough to cover all the possible spectrum of fuzz tones delivering slightly fuzzy overdrive, distortion, heavy fizzy distortion/fuzz, muff-like fuzz, and certainly get you into heavy gated, spitting fuzz. All this and still relatively easy to dial, with multiple sweet spots, no bad tones, no extreme and useless settings, like its “distant cousin” Fuzz factory.

The key features that make this fuzz so unique are its Bias control, which sets the amount of voltage that receives Transistor Q3, affecting the overall tone from being gated and gritty on one extreme, sustaining lead tone in the middle. Clean overdrive sounds at the other extreme.

The fat knob switches in between two input capacitors, thickening your signal straight from the start.

This Circuit was verified using both 2n5088 and the higher gain 2n5089; for sure, some MPS18 could do a great job as well. Feel free to socket and try different transistors until you find the one you love the most and share it with our pedal building community.

Controls

• Bias
• Fat
• Fuzz
• Tone
• Volume

For further analysis on this circuit take a look at this thread on Free Stomp Boxes Forum.

For any technical questions regarding this build don’t forget to check out our Facebook Group and our forum at Free Stomp Boxes.

Scarab Bender – Building Docs

Scarab Bender – Drilling Template