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Out of curiosity, I threw a Meathead together on the breadboard. I'll probably make it permanent and stick it in a box.


https://youtube.com/shorts/k3KPF0EBt8I? ... 600toG9Zdj


Here it is again, but with an LFO driving an LED in heatshrink with an LDR in series with the 9v supply. LED is green and not particularly bright. If I build this in and make it switchable, I imagine a super bright white LED would work better.

https://youtube.com/shorts/BPtylHrIY70? ... PoTyV5sroY

Both those clips sound good. Definitely needs to be louder!

Phosphene Audio wrote: ↑Sun Mar 16, 2025 11:37 am Out of curiosity, I threw a Meathead together on the breadboard. I'll probably make it permanent and stick it in a box.


https://youtube.com/shorts/k3KPF0EBt8I? ... 600toG9Zdj


Here it is again, but with an LFO driving an LED in heatshrink with an LDR in series with the 9v supply. LED is green and not particularly bright. If I build this in and make it switchable, I imagine a super bright white LED would work better.

https://youtube.com/shorts/BPtylHrIY70? ... PoTyV5sroY

Sounds cool! You might want to check the data sheet for the LDR; a lot of them are sensitive to a specific frequency of light - oddly enough that is often green !

Chankgeez wrote: ↑Sun Mar 16, 2025 1:27 pm Both those clips sound good. Definitely needs to be louder!

Even though I was in the basement, I was keeping it pretty quiet (can def hear the acoustic zing of the strings) because my wife was still asleep.

Not that I begrudge David Main charging whatever he can get, but the Meathead is a great sounding simple circuit that anyone who knows which end of a soldering iron to grab should take a crack at building. Some folks might want a larger input cap, or a couple of values on a switch.

moid wrote: ↑Sun Mar 16, 2025 3:13 pm

Phosphene Audio wrote: ↑Sun Mar 16, 2025 11:37 am Out of curiosity, I threw a Meathead together on the breadboard. I'll probably make it permanent and stick it in a box.


https://youtube.com/shorts/k3KPF0EBt8I? ... 600toG9Zdj


Here it is again, but with an LFO driving an LED in heatshrink with an LDR in series with the 9v supply. LED is green and not particularly bright. If I build this in and make it switchable, I imagine a super bright white LED would work better.

https://youtube.com/shorts/BPtylHrIY70? ... PoTyV5sroY

Sounds cool! You might want to check the data sheet for the LDR; a lot of them are sensitive to a specific frequency of light - oddly enough that is often green !

Good to know. Unfortunately, I just have a box full of them, no part number, and I have no idea where I got them, haha.

Sounds like the bag of different value ldrs I bought from ebay ~10 years ago; it have five bags inside it, each with a different hand written Chinese character on it and no way of knowing what each ldr is! I even asked one of my Chinese students if he could read it and he said whoever wrote it had terrible handwriting and the marks don’t make any sense! I chuck them into different projects to see if they work, but have since bought parts in labelled bags from actual electronics suppliers as a better way of designing pedals

Changing to a bright white LED made the LFO/LDR thing work much better.

I ended up putting the Meathead in a box, using a generic one knob fuzz board from Reverb.

Also, I put a Schaller Verzerrer on the breadboard this morning, the silicon one with extra stuff between C of Q1 and B of Q2. Even though the input cap is large, the high pass created by R3/C3 keeps it from being too bassy, or at least I think that's what is going on. There is no real point in the Intensity pot, though. Best thing is to just wire it for max fuzz.