The Trem Face Revealed

Copyright 2002 R.G. Keen. All rights reserved. No permission for local copies or display from web sites other than http://www.geofex.com.

The Trem Face is one of the rarest of the Dallas Arbiter products. It's kind of a mystery pedal, as so few were ever made. I
personally have never seen, let alone heard one. There is, however, a schematic on the web, graciously posted at foxrox.com.
Unfortunately, I've never seen any mention of anyone ever building one from this information. To satisfy my curiosity, I pored
through that schematic with my design hat on, and I decided that the schematic as drawn is sufficiently incorrect that it could
never work if built as shown.

A week or two after I put the first version of this article up, I got email from Ed Crozier. Ed is a vintage effect afficianado here
in Austin, and had recently bought two Trem Faces at ebay - both non-working. He offered me some bench time with the non-
functional units. Thanks to Ed, I was able to confirm my suspicions about the circuit, and ferret out some items I'd missed. I
now believe that the corrected circuit is indeed the circuit for a workable version of this vintage effect.

Here's my redraw of Dave's first schematic:

There are some obvious problems. The rate pot is a non-standard value, the BF2440 is an unknown part from any catalog I've
ever seen, and I've never found either a 3.7K resistor or a 16K trimpot in a catalog. Furthermore, the battery as shown is
connected with its positive to ground - the wrong polarity for the NPN BC184C to work. And what's the deal with that diode
across the trimpot?

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Here's the corrected circuit. The BC184C circuit is a perfectly workable phase shift oscillator if the battery terminals are
reversed, making the emitter the most negative terminal. That will get us a sine-wave LFO. The trimpot that was listed as 16K
and that I guessed was a 15K or 20K trimmer turned out to be a 1M trimpot on both units I worked on. That was a source of
trouble in both units that I played with, and I have an alternate circuit I think would be better. In any case, the trimpot, the
diode, and the 3.9K resistor provide an adjustable bias to the BF2440.

I had quessed that the "BF2440" was really a BF244 JFET for a variety of reasons. That turned out to be dead accurate. And, as
I guessed, D1 is a 5.7V Zener diode. The trimpot then adjusts for the differences between JFETs. The BF244 JFET comes in A,
B and C versions. I used a photo enhancing program and blew up the close-up of the part. With some edge sharpening and
thresholding, I made Dave's part to be a BF244B. That's what was in both units I worked on, too. It turns out that if you leave
out the zener or replace it with an ordinary silicon diode, the thing still works, in that you can tune in the JFET to give a tremolo
effect. However, the setting is then dependent on the battery voltage, so the unit will have varying operation depending on how
fresh the battery is and how the trimpot is set. The zener really has to be a zener for consistent operation.

The differences between the first and the corrected schematic are all errors I could easily have made in tracing this thing out if I
was in a hurry. It's only thinking about and trying to understand the circuit function that makes the changes to the second
schemo make sense.

There are still a couple of curiosities. The 0.68uF cap connecting to the gate of the JFET was bad on both units I had, and both
trimpots were broken. Odd, but not fatal. I'll have some recommendations later.

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 The Trem Face - pg.3
Copyright 2002 R.G. Keen. All rights reserved. No permission for local copies or display from web sites other than http://www.geofex.com.

Here's how it works: The BC184C NPN transistor is set up as a phase shift oscillator. The signal from its collector is routed
through three C-R phase shift networks - those 0.68uF caps and the resistors to ground between them. Two of the resistors to
ground are adjustable. Those are the two legs with a 4.7K resistor in series with sections of the dual pot. The third is fixed; the
resistance there is the parallel combination of the 15K and 68K biasing resistors on the transistor. The phase shift introduced by
the caps is enough at some frequency to cause a signal at the collector to be in phase, not inverted, from the signal at the
collector, so at that frequency the feedback is positive, and oscillations happen. Changing the two resistances changes the
frequency at which this happens, and therefore the frequency of oscillation.

A portion of the signal at the collector of the NPN is tapped off the collector at the junction of the 10K and 2.2K resistors and
fed through a capacitor to the gate of the BF244. This imposes the oscillator signal on top of whatever DC level is at the JFET
gate. The JFET gate is biased to a DC level determined by the zener diode voltage and the setting of the trimpot. I flatly
guessed at the value of the zener voltage, based on the pinchoff voltage of the JFET specs. With a 5V zener, you should be able
to trim in any BF244B that is within spec. The DC level can then be between 0V and -5V compared to the source of the JFET.
With 0V DC on the drain of the JFET, it's acting like a variable resistor. The zener turned out to be 5.7V, a very common value.
The JFET drain resistance can vary over a huge range - infinity (off) down to hundreds of ohms. The signal goes through the
series 10K resistor from input to output, but the output is shunted to ground by a variable resistance. This is the resistance of the
JFET in series with whatever the setting of the depth pot is. With the JFET resistance over 100K, there is no appreciable signal
loss.

The "bypass" just sets the signal loss to a factor of about 120/130, less than 1db and practically inaudible, especially with no
standard signal to compare it to.

This is very similar in concept to other tremolos, such as the EAN tremolo, the Diaz Tremadillo, and several others.

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 Still, there are some problems with the design, at least by modern standards. It had a low input impedance, and no true bypass
provisions. "Bypass" is done by flipping the switch to set a constant attenuation on the input signal instead of a varying one. I
decided that I could go the Trem Face one better. That's what's in this third schematic.

In this one, I've added a JFET source follower to buffer the input signal, and a Millenium Bypass to get true bypass with a
DPDT stomp switch. This makes the thing a much more palatable device for modern tastes. It's worth noting that the JFET is a
p-channel. I chose that because (a) it keeps the signal referenced to ground instead of the floating negative power supply as
would have happened with an N-channel JFET and (b) it simplified the circuit a lot. I picked the 2N5460 because it is readily
available from Mouser Electronics and inexpensive. Most P-channel JFETs should work OK in this circuit, although you might
have to select from a couple of different ones, as there is a wide range of parameters on JFETs.
I've added an RF suppression network, R1/C1 to the input to help kill off radio pickup. You may have seen FET circuits with
capacitors to ground at the input before. This may work, but it also may not. Depending on the frequency and a bunch of other
RF-magic conditions, adding only a capacitor to the input of a high impedance stage may make RF interference *worse* by
helping tune the interfering signal, and converting it to a lower impedance. Adding a series resistor before the cap insures that
the cap cannot tune the interference and that it does in fact reduce the signal level by causing attenuation through the R1/C1
divider that this forms.

I also modified the bias circuit a bit. I made the adjustment pot 100K, because 1M trimmers are hard to find, and even Radio
Shack has 100K trimmers. The 1M trimmer presented an impedance of about 250K to the signal through C8, so I stuck a 220K
resistor in series with the trimpot wiper to get the impedance up. This proved to work fine on Ed's units.

I haven't had a chance to true-bypass this thing yet. I suspect that when I do, it will uncover the common flaw in most older
effects converted to true bypass - signal drop in the effect mode. I'm betting that I'll have to diddle with the input JFET to make
it have a little gain, maybe two to four, so that the perceived loudness when the effect is engaged is the same as that when it's
bypassed. The older effects didn't make the loudness seem different because they also attenuated the "bypassed" signal by not
really bypassing it. Both effect and non-effect sound were lower level, so the change was not obvious.

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 did a PCB layout of the third schemo. The layout lets you build either the buffered version from schematic 3, or the
unbuffered original version in schemo 2 by just leaving some parts out and placing one resistor differently.

The layout above is the full version. You'll need to make some choices here. Notice that there is an unusually large area around
capacitors C3 and 5 through 8. This is because those caps may wind up being physically large. C3 is a 0.24uF film type in the
original circuit. I've included a space for that, but a 1uF NP electro cap would work as well, and might be more available. The
circle shows where the NP electro would go, and the rectangle where the film type would go. The extra holes are to
accommodate a variety of lead spacings. Caps 5 through 7 are even larger, 0.68uF. Fortunately, these caps do not carry audio in
this circuit, so you could use ceramic. I've added space that will allow even film types. The parts list includes several part
numbers that will work.

As a result of my bench experience with Ed Crozier's Trem Faces, I strongly, strongly recommend that you make C8 a non-
polar type. In spite of the fact that both original units I worked on and the one pictured on Dave's page had tantalum capacitors
for C5-C8, I think that this is flirting with failure. Use film capacitors (about $0.50 each) or non polarized (about $0.30 each) or
ceramic caps for these positions. They do not affect the audio signal, as no audio goes through them.

There are four pads under Q3, the oscillator transistor. That is to allow you to some freedom in selecting a transistor. Small TO-
92 packaged transistors come in a variety of pinouts, the most common ones being EBC and ECB (as viewed looking at the flat
with the leads down). The original BC184C is an ECB part; however, many of the more common transistors in the USA are
EBC. Pick the transistor you can get - a "vintage" or "NOS" BC184C will do not one thing to make this pedal sound original. If
you have one, fine. If not, you can use any one of several devices, notably the ever-popular and common as dirt 2N3904. The
3904 is EBC. Here's how the layout accomodates the two types. I laid it out for EBC (that's what I can get easiest, and hey, I'm
doing the layout, so why not 8-) but I added the fourth, square pad. The pad is connected to the center/base pad of the three
plain pads. By shifting the transistor over one pad and bending the emitter lead to reach farther, the ECB layout fits in neatly
too. Neat, huh?

The JFET is laid out for the common DSG pinout of most JFETs. Here's a mystery - the datasheets I found for the BF244 say
that it's DSG pinout, but the one on the board is wired DGS, and actually works that way. Maybe some BF244's have a different
pinout. My "dirty tricks" hackles always come up when a part has a nonstandard pinout, but this seems to be real. I bet if you
buy a BF244, it comes DSG. Check it with your ohmmeter to be sure.
(Previous Page) (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (Next Page)
 did a PCB layout of the third schemo. The layout lets you build either the buffered version from schematic 3, or the unbuffered
original version in schemo 2 by just leaving some parts out and placing one resistor differently.

The layout above is the full version. You'll need to make some choices here. Notice that there is an unusually large area around
capacitors C3 and 5 through 8. This is because those caps may wind up being physically large. C3 is a 0.24uF film type in the
original circuit. I've included a space for that, but a 1uF NP electro cap would work as well, and might be more available. The
circle shows where the NP electro would go, and the rectangle where the film type would go. The extra holes are to
accommodate a variety of lead spacings. Caps 5 through 7 are even larger, 0.68uF. Fortunately, these caps do not carry audio in
this circuit, so you could use ceramic. I've added space that will allow even film types. The parts list includes several part
numbers that will work.

As a result of my bench experience with Ed Crozier's Trem Faces, I strongly, strongly recommend that you make C8 a non-
polar type. In spite of the fact that both original units I worked on and the one pictured on Dave's page had tantalum capacitors
for C5-C8, I think that this is flirting with failure. Use film capacitors (about $0.50 each) or non polarized (about $0.30 each) or
ceramic caps for these positions. They do not affect the audio signal, as no audio goes through them.

There are four pads under Q3, the oscillator transistor. That is to allow you to some freedom in selecting a transistor. Small TO-
92 packaged transistors come in a variety of pinouts, the most common ones being EBC and ECB (as viewed looking at the flat
with the leads down). The original BC184C is an ECB part; however, many of the more common transistors in the USA are
EBC. Pick the transistor you can get - a "vintage" or "NOS" BC184C will do not one thing to make this pedal sound original. If
you have one, fine. If not, you can use any one of several devices, notably the ever-popular and common as dirt 2N3904. The
3904 is EBC. Here's how the layout accomodates the two types. I laid it out for EBC (that's what I can get easiest, and hey, I'm
doing the layout, so why not 8-) but I added the fourth, square pad. The pad is connected to the center/base pad of the three
plain pads. By shifting the transistor over one pad and bending the emitter lead to reach farther, the ECB layout fits in neatly
too. Neat, huh?

The JFET is laid out for the common DSG pinout of most JFETs. Here's a mystery - the datasheets I found for the BF244 say
that it's DSG pinout, but the one on the board is wired DGS, and actually works that way. Maybe some BF244's have a different
pinout. My "dirty tricks" hackles always come up when a part has a nonstandard pinout, but this seems to be real. I bet if you
buy a BF244, it comes DSG. Check it with your ohmmeter to be sure.
(Previous Page) (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (Next Page)