Germanium GiantVerified

From the post

Hey Guys! Zach(rocket88) here and I'm very excited to join the tagboardeffects squad. So first, just have to thanks to Mark and Miro for not just the opportunity, but for really teaching me along the way so that I could even be in this position. I also have to give a big up, and thanks the rest of crew, Travis, Javi, and Alex. We're all in for an amazing ride, and great time to be a part of the site. But, onto my first post for the main site!

As some of you may know, I have been dubbed the Emperor of the Germanium Deathstar, mostly due to my obsession for all things Germanium. Awhile back there was a request for a layout for Nick Greer's Green Giant, which really was nothing more then an Electra Boost with a pot to control the amount of signal that gets clipped by the diodes.

With Beaker, there was some R&D on this effect that ended up finding that the original Electra was all Germanium, so it was changed from all Silicon to all Germanium. This turned out to be not just a simple effect to build, but an amazing sounding one to boot. All of the discussion on it can be found in the Contributions thread, but there has been a lot of requests to make an official layout, which you will find below.

Now a couple of things to remember with this effect:

1 - you can use any diode, Si, Ge, LED, BAT, etc. as each one will give its own flavor, so socket the diodes and try whatever you got.

2 - you can use any NPN Germanium transistor, as they will change the effect slightly. MP38's are a little dark, tesla 104NU71 are a little brighter. so don't be afraid to experiment, but try to keep it less then 100hfe

3 - the trimmer sets the bias, you can do this by ear.

I figured I'd include a PNP version, as some people may have a lot more PNP Germanium Transistors then NPN ones. This layout is also verified, but, and this is a huge but, you will need to audition transistors, as no one really said what they used that sounded good. Do NOT use AC125's or AC128's as they will not sound good at all in this circuit, so you will be majorly disappointed if you try to use them.

Requested PNP layout without the inverter.

Also, i forgot to say to socket the input and output caps to. i found the stock 100nF caps to be a little more trebley then I'ld like, especially for my bass. In mine I've got 470nF caps for both input and output caps, which makes it much fuller, and retains the all the low end of my bass when compared to the bypassed signal. So by all means try different combinations.