I love the sound of fuzz bass. But as a bass player, it sometimes seems like I’ve been on an endless quest for a great sounding bass fuzz circuit. I’ve tried quite a few different ones, both commercial and DIY, and the one that I keep coming back to is the fuzz channel from the classic Acoustic 360 Bass Preamp.

Over the years, I’ve built a number of different versions of the Acoustic 360 Bass Fuzz, always adding some additional tweaks and modifications to the next one to make it sound progressively better to my ears. And so, I’ve always had some version of the Acoustic 360 Bass Fuzz on my bass pedalboard. But, I think I might have finally gotten to the point where I just don’t need to tinker with it anymore. This may be my final revision of the Acoustic 360 Bass Fuzz.

The factory schematic for the Acoustic 360 Bass Preamp is widely available on the internet. Here is the detail of the original stock fuzz section.

And here is my current tweaked, modified and revised version.

Compared to the original, I’ve added a clean blend circuit based on the EH Mole/Hog’s Foot, a decay control that let’s you dial in short, gated fuzz sounds, and I either eliminated or adjusted a few component values to make the circuit sound better when powered at 9 volts instead of the 24 volts that was used in the original circuit.

Speaking of sound, here’s a short video that illustrates how it works and sounds.

Here’s some construction documentation if you would like to build your own Three-Sixty Bass Fuzz from scratch.

More videos: http://www.youtube.com/user/moosapotamus

Additional sound clips: https://soundcloud.com/moosapotamus