My FET Driver underwent successful Vulcan Surgery

[will]

Hi,

I just vulcanized Tim’s FET Driver circuit and it sounds awesome. After comparing the Vulcan & the FET Driver in a Jam session on Wednesday, the other guitarist thought the Vulcan sounded fantastic   and was trying to get a similar tone from is tube amp. He got close to the tone but his sound was kind of muddy, more overdrive than he can get cleanly. In comparison The FET Driver was too dynamic.  :? It had great tone but was either too loud or too soft when playing in a group setting. So I decided to try some Vulcan surgical techniques on the FET Driver last night.

I added 2 germanium diodes back to back, three 1 meg resistors to bias the diodes and an extra .1uF coupling cap, between Q1 drain and the .1 uF coupling cap. Carefully stirred it with my soldering iron juiced with a bit of silver solder and viola, fantastic overdrive sound I wish my amp had in the 1st place.  

The diodes do compress the sound in a very pleasing way; the distortion is very tube like with low noise. It’s a full powerful sound which can be light and bluesy, or clean with a mild compression. This is coupled to my previous mod, the HF filter which I borrowed from Doug’s Meteor.  

The sound cleans up really well with the guitar volume control. The circuit is very responsive to picking techniques.  I can set up the sound to play stairway to heaven clean for the finger picking part and have similar Page like distortion to the harder driven chords with no change to the volume control.  The odd thing is the gain control is just above minimum. I will probably box the effect with the gain preset.

This is now my top OD effect I’ve built. This is a great hobby!

Regards,
Will

[David]

...and does it have pointed knobs and behave very logically?

Sorry, man, I couldn't help it! :oops:

[keko]

That was, indeed, the next logical question to ask....


you are forgiven.

[RDV]

....he's dead Jim....

RDV out