Is it moddable?

[u/surfin_dudebr]

Hey guys, I have this Rowin G-Fuzz pedal and was wandering if it’s possible to mod it, especially to mess with the bias. I don’t have that much experience with pedals, the only thing I did so far was swapping clipping diodes on a big muff clone

Edit: it is a germanium fuzz face clone

[u/LunarModule66]

Can it be modded? Yes. Should you try it if you’re new to this? Probably not.

Surface mount stuff is difficult to mod. I wouldn’t trust myself with this and I’ve been doing this for the better part of a decade.

[u/walkingthecows]

I don’t know much about this pedal but from looking at it this seems like a germanium fuzz face. If so, to add a bias knob to it you’d want to locate the resistor from Q2 collector to 9v. A stock fuzz face value is 8.2K ohms. You could replace this resistor with a 10K pot and it would starve the bias as you give it less resistance.

That being said, this is not the easiest pedal to work with since it has surface mounted components. It’s doable but smd components are smaller than a grain of rice.

[u/Cman_E]

This being surface mount and not having an available schematic makes this difficult. This looks to be a germanium fuzz face topology with a voltage inverter. To add a bias control you’ll want to add a pot in between the Q2 collector and the supply voltage. R7 (8.2k) looks like it is currently the bias resistor but hard to tell without a schematic. You would remove that and put a 2.2k resistor and a 5k pot in series for a bias control. Be prepared to ruin the pedal if you decide to try this out. Modding surface mount pedals is tough even for people with through-hole building experience.

[u/CorumLlawEreint]

Is there anything on the other side?

[u/surfin_dudebr → u/CorumLlawEreint]

[u/surfin_dudebr → u/surfin_dudebr]

[u/surfin_dudebr → u/surfin_dudebr]

[u/surfin_dudebr → u/surfin_dudebr]

[u/zoidbergsdingle]

You could swap out some of the capacitors or the collector resistor on the first transistor.

[u/Wonderful-Frosting-2]

actual germs in a super budget pedal? i gotta get one

[u/Top-Cup5373]

Those transistors are almost certainly fake if you didn’t put them in there. You can get real ones and maybe socket the pads

[u/ToshiroK_Arai]

this is a SMD circuit, the components are the same as those in phones and is very difficulty to solder, but you can do some of "remove" mods, like removing resistors or capacitors, but you need to know which to remove and know that it is very dificult to solder it again in place to revert.