Foxx Tone Machine

This is the pedal that started it all for me. Several years ago, I began my pedal acquisition journey and started modelling my first real, tricked out pedal board after Justin Chancellor’s. I was able to find many of the necessaries and usual suspects locally—you’ve got your Boss Chorus, Delay, and Flanger, ProCo Rat, the MXR Bass Envelope Filter—but some of the seemingly crucial fuzzes such as the Colorsound Tone Bender and the Foxx Fuzz Wah Volume were nowhere to be found here in Israel.

And then I had the wild idea of building my own pedals. Why not? I had a good friend from work who built his own, and I started asking him all the questions. Next thing I knew, I was surfing the forums, downloading layouts, and browsing parts retailers. Now, the absolute first project I ever took on was pretty simple—modding an old Boss Flanger to use a PSA instead of an ACA adaptor (as I had purchased my own back in 1996 or whenever). As a proof of concept, I had shown myself that I was capable of handling a soldering iron.

But my next project would be incredibly ambitious. I decided to take on the Foxx Tone Machine—an incredibly hard-hitting fuzz monster with an octave switch which activates its Germanium diodes for a gnarly sneering fuzz on bass and piercing octave up on guitar. The demos of this beast were promising. My hope was to successfully build it, fire it up on my first try, implant it into a modded Dunlop Crybaby Wah, and presto! A Foxx Fuzz Wah Volume!

No such luck. It turns out making your own circuits is difficult. But I kept at it. I tried Effects Layouts’ perf layout twice and could not get it to work. It was not easy. I then settled for a vero layout as it was a bit easier and less time consuming than perf board; as such, I had much better luck with SabroTone’s layout, and I was thrilled to fire it up and find it working!

At that point, I had decided to simplify things, and maybe not take on embedding it inside a wah, give it its own dedicated build. So I did. And then I decided to put it in a smaller box. And I was happy for a while. And then I let one of my best friends borrow my build, and that was the last I had seen of my poor Foxx Tone Machine for a while. So I guess it was a success.

Fast forward to a year or so later, and I was still jonesing for a FTM. But at this point, I had a lot more experience building under my belt, and had more or less learned how to create my own layouts, and adjust them to my own needs. So that’s exactly what I did. Here is that layout.

Foxx Tone Machine layout by Daniel @ Carcharias Effects

And now I also could finally implement it into a working Fulltone Clyde wah enclosure for my very own Foxx Fuzz Wah Volume clone:

And, yes, it totally rips.

Happy building! 🤘🦈

Edit: And by the way, for you DIYers—a fabbed PCB version of this circuit is available in the store!

3 thoughts on “Foxx Tone Machine”

  • I am building one of the last Fulltone Clyde Mccoys that I bought from a dude who bought parts off a dude who was working at fulltone when they shutdown a few months ago. I am having trouble with building it and wondered if you would be able to help me out with it. For the most part, I was given detailed instructions that the workers get when they were building these, problem is, they must have had another source of information as it tells me to refer to the “Sample” to finish the wiring, but I have no idea what they mean by “Sample” as I do not have anything to reference. I have just a few more wires to solder. I would love to make mine a fuzz wah as well, any way you could show us how you did that? I am just a dude who wants to learn as much as I possibly can.

    • Hey John, I’ve got mixed experience with fuzz-wahs. I think I’ve built mostly two kinds, both of which use the wah circuit that is more or less the same exact topology as the Dunlop Crybaby. You can look up the schematics for all of those and compare them and mix and match parts to your liking. As for the fuzz part, I’ve used both a Bazz Fuss (which I absolutely loved), and a Foxx Tone Machine. With the FTM I specked it out exactly like the Foxx Fuzz Wah Volume. Schematics are available for that online. The principle feature for that on the wah side was the ability to modify the frequency cap so that it went well with bass. The Bazz Fuss had one good sound and it worked really well, so I didn’t feel the need to have multiple knobs for the fuzz side of that. As for which order to put them, YMMV. I’ve had fuzz>wah and wah>fuzz and there were two deciding factors for which order to choose: amount of noise, and awesomeness. IIRC, the Foxx is Fuzz > Wah, and the Bazz Fuss-based one I made was Wah > Fuzz. Kind of bummed I sold that one, actually, I was getting a lot of Geezer vibes from it.

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