A cheap and cheerful solid state practice amplifier!
For most of my recording, I go direct. As much as I would love to plug in the tube amp and wind up the volume, it’s just not practical in an apartment.
One of the things I want to do more of is be able to just pick up an instrument and play. Enter the noisy cricket: originally the Ruby from Runoff Groove, the Noisy Cricket was developed by Beavis Audio, and adds a tone control, and a “grit” switch, for extra breakup. An explanation of how the circuit works can be found at Electrosmash.
In the spirit of “cheap and cheerful”, my build started off as a Ruby, on a piece of vero board I had laying around, and almost all of the parts are scavenged, apart from the LM386 amplifier IC and the MPF102 JFET. It’s all housed in a solid state guitar amp that I found by the side of the road and gutted. The original plan was to build a 1W all-tube practice amplifier, but then I came to my senses and realised the Ruby/Noisy Cricket World be way more straightforward ?
The first build was straightforward, but didn’t work at all. Damn. After putting it aside for a few days, I retraced the circuit, and found I’d messed up the layout. The instructions I was using had a different pinout to the JFET; I’d modified the layout to suit, but the layout in the image was actually OK.
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Rebuild #1, and it works! Sort of. There’s a lot of oscillation, and a nasty hum that gets really loud if the guitar lead is fiddled with. After some digging round on DIY Stompboxes, I decided that vero is probably just inviting oscillation, and ordered a PCB from Fuzz Dog pedal parts.
The PCB build made things way simpler – but then, still a buzz! After poking things with my finger (so scientific, don’t try that with a valve amp!) and some advice from the folks on the DIY Stompboxes forum, I worked out it’s a ground issue, with the circuit amplifying the 50 Hz mains him. Frustrating, but easily fixed – some shielded wire on the input, and it’s quite a handy practice amp, now!
