I built a clone of The Rocket (see aron's page). It is a FF-like pedal that uses high gain Si, 2N5088 hFE=450, with an interesting input buffer that increases the gain and let the use of humbuckers and wah pedals before it. Also it behaves nicely when you roll back the guitar volume.
As stated in the schematic the sound is rich and musical even though it is a high gain pedal. But yet harsh and thin for my ears, in particular when rolling back the guitar volume. Also some artifacts are heard when the notes begin to decay. A fat sound can be obtained changing the 47k feedback resistor for a 68k or a 100k. Dont' get me wrong, it sounds good but it is Si, you know what I mean.
So I decided to modify it using three 2SB176 Matsushhita Ge hFE=200 leakage under 200uA.
The sound improved a lot, fat and smooth, no high freqs burning my ears, but less gain as expected. How to get the gain of the Si version?
I got the answer from the 3-knob tonebender. I built a darlington pair using two low-leakage low-gain 2SA53 Toshiba Ge (hFE=20 & 40, combined hFE=800) with the same bias resistor.
Almost the same gain level with all the benefits of the Ge transistors and extras mentioned above. Also, the buffer does not need special Ge transistors so one can try that useless Ge that won't fit on a FF and cost a lot.
I liked it so much that I named it 'The Entreprise'.

mac

Note: the FF section of 'the rocket' may need some tweaking to set the correct bias. Follow the schematics instructions. If you cannot tune it try replacing some of the 10k with a 20k trimpot.
I used 104 caps instead of the 103 after the buffer. Changed the 47k feedback resistor with a 68K. No need of a cap to roll off the highs.

-- Edited by mac at 10:33, 2005-09-22