Face Disaster

From the vendor

This unruly circuit features an oscillator running in conjunction with a gated fuzz and can play a lot of roles - aggressive fuzz, thin spitty fuzz, envelope filter, phaser, siren, bizarre tremolo, ring mod, or an all out noise device. Perhaps even a bit of all of the above.

The Ugly Face fuzz circuit by Tim Escobedo has been a DIY favorite of fuzz insanity for years. After building a version of it myself, I had several of my own ideas I was interested in trying to incorporate, as well as the Mick Bailey LFO Mod.

In addition to the traditional Envelope modulation, and the LFO modulation, I have added a third mode where the oscillator is constant in pitch, for unwavering insanity. The oscillator functions as an intense tone control with searing highs and thick lows.

It is common for people to starve the circuit for voltage, but I wanted to separate the LM555 oscillator chip from the LM386 chip responsible for the guitar fuzz. As a result you can get more varied options, most notably starving the oscillator without killing the guitar fuzz and volume, or vice versa. Or starve them both and see what's left.

As is often the case with oscillators, the first version of this circuit that I built had the issue of the oscillator bleeding into the bypassed signal - even when the pedal was off, the oscillator could still be faintly heard. This has been resolved by routing the power of the FACE DISASTER such that the oscillator is completely powered off when the pedal is turned off, and thus the bleed is gone.

There are also a handful of small modifications that I made throughout the circuit, so that it performed how I imagined. I won't go into the boring details, but feel free to compare my schematic below with the assorted versions floating around online.

[ LISTEN - FACE DISASTER DEMO VIDEO ]