PAiA Quadrafuzz

If you're smart enough to build it,you're smart enough to use it. A 7, because it requires intelligence. It's not a "pop-it-outta-the-box-drop-a-9v-plugin-'n-go" unit. PAiA has suggestions in the manual, or you can dig up Craig Anderton's article in an old "Guitar Player" mag or his "Projects for Guitarists" book. But c'mon, you're scratch building and experimenting here. USE YOUR EARS!!! Tons of flexibility and unbelievable tones. Spin those knobs. Be sure to write your favorite settings down. The best unit on the planet, available to those not afraid to D-I-Y (do-it-yourself). Thanks a billion Craig!

I dial in a "Black Sabbath" type tone for low volume situations. I usually dial in a "creamy, smooth, sustainy" tone for leads. These are my favorites. There are tons of tones more to explore. It's not programable, so build a second or third unit for the rack. Buy the kit with the rack mount panel, as it'll allow for easy access while tweaking the setting. Building it as a foot pedal doesn't seem practical to me.
My main setup: Guild S300D (Dimazio PAF neck, Super Distort bridge),to a Morley PWB, to the Quadrafuzz, to an ADA delay, split (wet/dry) between a combination of Sunn amps (SL160's 1x12, Concert Lead w/4x12 cab or Stagemaster 2x12 combo)depending upon room size. It always sounds good.
One thing I added during the build: use single conductor shielded wire to suppress any EMI (electro magnetic interference) as there isn't a metal box to cover this unit. That's the only drawback, no cover kit.

I built it. It always works. It's been about 20 years ago now that I built it. It's well protected in a rack case. Damn reliable, I'd say.

PAia's still there. Never had to call them. Send money, recieve kit. Check their website as they've upgraded the kit to include the power supply. Is the rack panel now extra? Mine included it. Ask them. As I said, it's been 20 years.

I've been playing electric guitar since 1970. My main influences are Frank Zappa, Pink Floyd, Black Sabbath & Rush to name a few. Stylistically: "Old School Metal(as my son calls it), psychedelic, progressive, jazz-rock, along with stints of pop rock. My gear consists of vintage Guild guitars, Sunn & Supro amps. Funny, they were new when I bought them?
If anything happened I'd build another, or two, or three.
And, yes, I do have a trunkful of other toys I slip into the signal chain every once in a while. Good luck. Use a low wattage soldering iron (25 Watts or less).

There are so many ways to change the sound on this thing, you might think it would be hard to get a good tone. On the contrary, everything I've ever dialed in has been usable, and getting spectacular fuzz sounds is easy. Since you build the thing, it's easy to figure out what does what. The manual is pretty good for building, and OK for getting started USING it, but leaves playing around up to you. Hey, you can't EXPLODE the thing no matter what you do. Oh, yeah, there's an input for any ordinary foot switch, and an LED for status. I got noise using that, so I built a little hard-bypass for it.

It's a fuzz, not a dimed tube amp. So work with what it IS, not what it ISN'T. But it's an amazing fuzz. Every different guitar you plug into it will change its sound. Run it into the board (and you can run it in stereo or even quad) and it's great. Run it into a fairly clean amp, even SS, and it's fine. Run it into a dimes amp and I don't know what the hell it'll sound like. Try it and lemme know.

It isn't noisy, considering how many parts and wires there are. If you won't pay attention to the directions you can get a ground loop or shorts or opens or just plain backward parts. Well, what do you expect? TONS of gain in this design.

The manual say you can get a Keith Richards "chunky"tone, and you can. Mostly though, I use it to get sounds nobody else has. Which it does. You can patch in a compressor (ewwww!) for a bit more sustain, but it does quite well by itself. .

I know I can depend on my unit because I built it and I've been messing with this stuff for years. But be forewarned-- PAIA calls this thing "Two pounds of wire and a circuit board" or something like that (I think it's more like three pounds of wire) and you've got to have patience. Then too you've got to find/make a case for it, and powersupply. Easy stuff but you have to do it. I blew the digital switching chip about four times because I insisted on trying something my way. Cheap chips, OK, I learned from my mistake. Also, it has a variable treble roll-off, which I just ignore. Lately I wired the dual pot backwards just so it would be more usable (has to do with pot tapers-- linear, log, and anti-log), and it's better, but I still mostly ignore it. Craig Anderton, the designer, it seems can't resist adding lots of little goodies, which mostly are great-- I've built a LOT of his designs-- OK, so this one ain't. Big deal. If I hadn't gotten the kit with the panel, I would have just bypassed the treble roll-off from the board. I probably would also have deleted the individual filter outputs-- lotta wire, lotta potential goofs. But I left 'em in and they ARE fun to send to different channels of the board.

One thing about building it yourself-- if it quits, you can likely make a stab at fixing it. But there isn't much to break.

They're pretty helpful over there at PAIA. I've been talking with Scott, their tech, for at least 15 years. Try getting a hold of a tech at DOD or BOSS or Yamaha. Maybe you can, maybe you can't For sure you can with PAIA.

I'm a child of the 60's, but I've gravitated to jazz and jazz-blues for at least 25 years. Nevertheless, I have frequent attacks of "rock" -- thrash-metal, usually, go figger. THAT's when I fire up the ol' Quadrafuzz. It never fails to get me all sweaty and breathing hard-- and puts a big smile on my face. It's the most fun fuzzbox I've ever tried-- and I LOVE to play with effects. If I lost it, and get some free time (two afternoons should do it), I'd order up another Quadrafuzz. I'm a knob twiddler-- and this thing has knobs, lots of 'em. Nothing else on the market compares. It even beats most of the "overdrive" pedals (which are just fuzzboxes, ALL of 'em are, pretty near). My only other tones are jazz clean and dimed-small-amp-- '66 Bassman modified, Blues Junior(s), Champ 12(s) (I play stereo when ever I can), Dual Shoman, and two MotionSound combos. Generally I play big archtops like Epiphone's Emperor (Batrolini pickup),Broadway, with Seymour Duncan pickups, or a Jim Hall model with a Bartolini 1E at the neck. I get feedback but I use it. Oh and there's generally a Strat laying around, always with some version of DiMarzio's Virtual Vintage, in the neck (did I say I only ever use neck pickups?).

I'm not going to make mention of assembly problems. I made the unit from Craig Anderton's book "Do-It-Yourself Projects For Guitarists", rather than purchasing the kit from PAiA (they're the same product, though, and the book recommends buying the kit). I had little trouble making it (a few issues with bad joints and shorts to ground), but this is the first complicated circuit I've assembled, and it only required a few hours with a CRO and tone generator to trace down the faults in it (helps having an electrical engineer to annoy!).

The second I plugged it in and switched it out of Bypass mode it was making beautiful crunchy rhythm sounds. There's plenty of settings to play with, and it will take you a while to explore everything in there. The book is not particularly useful in suggesting places to start with settings (2 suggestions only), I don't know about the kit's instructions.

I played it through two setups:

Guitar -> Quadrafuzz -> Fender Hot Rod

and

Guitar -> Dunlop Wah -> Zoom GFX-8 (Quadrafuzz as external Distortion loop) -> Direct Output

Directly into the amp it was LOUD on the clean channel. The GFX-8 brought the volume back to reasonable levels, however, and this is the setup I intend to use it in. Rhythm sounds from this are all there at the flick of a switch - the four channels effectively acting as a 4 stage EQ unit. I didn't notice this being any cleaner than a standard Fuzz effect (as was described in the book). I'm yet to find a lead tone that sounds perfect, but there's plenty of scope in there, and lots to try.

So what can you play with it? Heavy power chords ring out beautifully, whether you like them bottom heavy, more in the mid, or scooped. There's some nice sustain, especially up high. If you turn the Attack right down then you can get some light fuzz, but I'd be more tempted to use the amp for that, as it sounds a little dirty... this baby is a high gain thing for sure! It made all the right noises with effects... the Slow Delay setting I use on my GFX-8 sounded especially nice (limits the top end and does a fade in for each note, gives a very nice mysterious sound). I think this unit will do me for quite some time.

It's currently a sheet of copper with wires and knobs hanging off all sides... (yes, I will be putting it in a shielded box, after I rebuild some of the high gain parts to reduce noise further!)... reliability for kit like this depends on how well you build it and how good the components are.

N/A

I'm a fan of prog rock/prog metal, though just starting out (been seriously playing guitar for a year and a half now). This fills in quite a few gaps in my range of sounds, though it's not a solution for everything (you won't get blues out of it, for instance). As a low-cost, easily customisable unit, you can't get much better. If I add some presets to it, this will serve as a good all round distortion device.

For this thing too sound bad the user would have to crank all the knob full blast to easy not to get a good fuzz sound It's what you want.

sounds great just be carefull when assembling it.

I built it About three years ago i'll tell you no problems
I use it my main distortion unit and I'm planing on building
a second with a few mod. Where I hope it to be better than the
first one I made.It is hard believe it could sound better.

very friendly.
Never needed any help for a REPAIR BUT i KNOW THEY WOULD BE GREAT

Buy this fuzz build it and enjoy rich fuzz tones unlike you've never
heard before. From clean sounding blues to metal it does it all.

There is not another Fuzz/Distortion device in the market like this one. It is virtually impossible to get a bad sound out of it, and with separate level controls and resonance switches for each frequency distorted, I spent hours playing with it, getting different results every time I spun a knob or flicked a switch. The assembly manual is written assuming the builder doesn't know a thing about electronics. In fact, before I built mine I built one for a friend who didn't know electronics. He could have assembled it himself the way this is explained. Of course, once I heard how his worked I had to have one of my own.

I have tried the Quadrafuzz with single coils and humbuckers. With solid state amps and tube amps. I'm convinced it will work with any guitar and amp combination. My only problem with the device was with the filtering cicuit, which can be found directly after the effect loop circuit. It just didn't sound good to my ears, so I eliminated it altogether. But that is just a question of taste.

Because it is a kit it will only be as reliable as the builder. I elected to not use the optional rack face, instead I purchased a nice Bud chassis (not cheap, but worth every penny) and mounted the circuit board, pots, switches, power supply and all inside it. It sits on the floor as a stomp box, and it is very reliable indeed. Having said that, I always have backups for everything at my gigs anyway. If something can go wrong, it will go wrong when I'm not prepared.

When I built this kit I used a solid copper wire across the ground plane to make attaching the shielded cable easier. This was not in the builder's plans, but it something I've done before when building effects. When I finished the kit I could hear a hum, very annoying. I called PAiA after my own troubleshooting attempts did not help, and spoke to their tech support. He suggested I remove the copper wire and solder the shields directly to the pcb. I did that and that took care of the problem. So, great customer/tech support at PAiA.

One thing I didn't mention above is that because this is a kit, modifying it to your own specs/wants/desires is very easy. I eliminated the filter circuit, as I stated above. I also used different types of LED's in the fuzz circuits to get a wider variety of fuzz textures. I used polystyrene caps instead of the ceramics in the tone shaping circuits. Not only does it sound great, but I now have an effects pedal that is as unique as I am. You just can't always accomplish that with same old stuff that everyone else uses. I have loaned my Quadrafuzz out to several guitarists, all with different styles of play, and the general concensus is that the Quadrafuzz is probably the end-all-be-all of fuzz pedals. I would definitely build another if this was stolen.