The "Royal" Fuzz
JC Maillet (c) 2003
A clone of a 60's Japanese Royal octaver fuzz - also appearing under the brand names Bruno, Unicord, ShinEi - the circuit is near identical to the fuzz circuit of the JAX Fuzz-Wah as well ... probably from the same design team in Japan ... I found the schematic at Dan Norris' site:Fuzz Guts
The two original Royal pedals I was given to clone manifested little octaving - a Harmony-Central search on these pedals reveals that few players ever mention the octave effect, not really strange in a sense because the circuit won't produce a strong octave if the differential circuit is not well balanced side to side ... by using hfe-matched transistors and 1% tolerance resistors in the octaver section we can max out the effect of combined even harmonics passing through the differential stage ... this is a standard approach for maximizing the octave component in these types of circuit - unlikely to have been performed in the day ...
I drew Royal component values into the fuzz section of Dan's JAX "Fuzz-Wah" schematic - the notes written in my schematic reflect my "improved" clone attempt, not the original ... in the mp3 I used a pedal built with 1n4148 Silicon diodes in the clipping section - if you use Germanium fuzz diodes you'll get less output ... the original drive control is useless to me, so it's wired full-on ... the midBand/fullBand tone switch gives the circuit two highly contrasting tones, I find both sounds really great ...
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(c) 2003 JC Maillet / Harvey Windsor / Lou Militerno
Greco Strat >> OctaverFuzz >> '76 50w Marshall mkII >> SM57 >> Korg D1600