The original vintage Acoustic Control Corp 360 bass preamps from the late 60's were great preamps (and still are one of my favorites), but they also had a very unique germanium fuzztone circuit built into them. After building the Viva-Analog 360+ preamp, I though that I'd like to just have its fuzz circuit as a stand-alone pedal. Getting out the original schematic, I drew up a veroboard layout for it using the exact same original circuit and built it up.
Since the original was built into the preamp, I felt that it could use some eq so instead of adding treble and bass controls, I added a 'tilt' tone circuit which I've become very fond of as used in the English Quad preamps and the Diamond compressors. Being able to boost the lows while cutting the highs definitely made it more versatile (and smoother sounding), but then thought that a clean blend would be another nice addition to it, so I added that as well. The standard clean blend is at unity gain when set to 100% clean (in this case fully clockwise) but I actually wanted it to be at unity gain at 12:00, so I could use the pedal as a clean boost, or have more clean on tap while dialing in the fuzz so I also added a clean JFet boost to the output. I love the pedal now. It's definitely not you 'garden variety' fuzztone. It's nature is rude, buzzy and nasty but I can now further control that with the tilt control. There's definitely some upper octave harmonics going on at certain settings too, so it doesn't sound like any other fuzz pedal that I have (and you know that I have A LOT of them ;-) )
Pics below:
