# The Pinche Cabron - an AS3046D Superfuzz



## jubal81 (Nov 27, 2020)

I went over to Smallbear's site and noticed a new IC he's stocking on the front page. It's the AS3046D, which is 5 BJT, NPN transistors, with two of them a matched, differential pair. Since reading Chuck's transistor matching thread the other day, I've had the Superfuzz on the brain, since I've always been curious and have never built one.

So when I saw that chip, my brain:







So, I've whipped up this so far:


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## Chuck D. Bones (Nov 27, 2020)

Is it me, or is that the world's tiniest schematic?


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## jubal81 (Nov 27, 2020)

Lol. I didn't realize you can't click to blow those up.
Updated the layout a bit, too.


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## jubal81 (Nov 28, 2020)

I'm interested in the classic version, but just to spitball:
I could use one of the NPNs on the chip as a bootstrapped 'cornish' input buffer. Replace the phase splitter with a dual opamp. Add another dual opamp after the Ge diode clippers for a proper tone stack and makeup gain.


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## cooder (Nov 28, 2020)

Pretty clever stuff you're cooking up there....! Whoop whoop. Interested to see and hear how this pans out.


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## perfboarder (Nov 28, 2020)

Cornish Chip for everyone


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## Chuck D. Bones (Nov 28, 2020)

If you've got opamps, why go to the trouble of building a Cornish buffer?

Have you played a pedal that uses a differential pair for octave generation?  I played around a bit with that configuration when I was building & modding the Apple Fritter.  You can bias it so both transistors are off or both are on a little bit. Either way, there is a dead-band where no signal gets thru. Alternatively, you can deliberately unbalance the biasing so that as the signal decays, the octave drops out.  In all cases, you get a gating effect, so make sure you like that part of it before spending too much time developing a circuit around that particular functional block.  I prefer the diode octave-up, like the Squidward, Foxx Tone Machine, etc., but that's just my personal preference.


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## jubal81 (Nov 28, 2020)

Chuck D. Bones said:


> If you've got opamps, why go to the trouble of building a Cornish buffer?
> 
> Have you played a pedal that uses a differential pair for octave generation?  I played around a bit with that configuration when I was building & modding the Apple Fritter.  You can bias it so both transistors are off or both are on a little bit. Either way, there is a dead-band where no signal gets thru. Alternatively, you can deliberately unbalance the biasing so that as the signal decays, the octave drops out.  In all cases, you get a gating effect, so make sure you like that part of it before spending too much time developing a circuit around that particular functional block.  I prefer the diode octave-up, like the Squidward, Foxx Tone Machine, etc., but that's just my personal preference.


A year or two ago, I had a Muff type thing on the breadboard with that diode octave up on a sidechain and blended back in with a mixer at the output. If I remember, it actually worked pretty well.


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