Tone Bakery" "Cream Fraiche"????? Help?

[brokenstarguitar]

Hey guys! Hows everyone doing? I have a few questions Im hoping someone can help with. Well, I just received a "Tone Bakery" "Cream Fraiche" from a client. Its a JTM45 preamp clone using 5 J201s in substitute of the tubes.

His complaints are...
1. Has alot of noise.
2. Way to much Gain.
3. "Lower Output level (in his own words).

He also wants me to hardwire Treble and Presence at 0% and Bass at 100%. Thats easy enough. But whats your thoughts about either bypass or substituting some of the JFET stages for lower noise, gain, and output?

Now Ive heard this is a poor attempt at a clone of another pedal out there but I cant find where I read it or if I even did (couldve been one of the other projects im doing though lol).

Ive attached pictures of the pcb. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!

[brokenstarguitar]

Anyone?

[Kipper4]

It s that a dr boogie type circuit?

Could you rebias some stages.

I think your friend chose the wrong circuit for his gear possibly.
It much depends what's going into it. Or on the back end of it.

Hate the tone stack on it (Dr Boogie) sub it for a different one.

Lower output level than bypassed?
Is that it?

[DougH]

I just watched a youtube demo of this thing. Yuck...

Years ago I built a pedal I called a "Beanolator". It was basically a couple JFET miniboosters and a JTM45 tone stack. Guess what, it didn't sound anything like a JTM45 or like Beano either. I plugged it in a couple months ago for the first time in a decade or so, and it surprisingly sounded pretty good, but nothing like the namesake.

My point is that just because something is "modeled after" or "based on" something else doesn't mean it sounds anything like it. For one, unless they're using a charge pump or something, headroom will always be a problem with this kind of thing at 9v. They will always sound a lot more "high gain" than the thing they are modeling. Then there's always the EQ complication and exaggeration that occurs when you plug something EQ'd to sound like "guitar amp XXX" into another guitar amp with its own EQ idiosyncracies.

In short, as the other person mentioned, I think your friend just bought the wrong pedal. Treble/presence at 0 and bass at 100% are red flags to me. Sounds like the basic design is just voiced completely incorrectly for him.

Sorry if I couldn't be of more help.

[vigilante397]

Have you tried it yourself? That's always my first step when working on any piece of gear, make sure you understand and agree with their statements.

That being said, the four trimpots on the bottom of the PCB are the bias adjustments for each of the four gain stages (the last JFET just being an EQ recovery stage). That will tame the gain and should also help with the noise. I can't speak for the output level, but that's why you should try it yourself to see what he's talking about and then you could work from there.

Also my experience with JFET preamp emulators has always been that they are bright and on the harsh side, so treble and presence hard wired at 100% make me very nervous, and I definitely agree with Doug, that's a red flag that he may be wanting to turn this pedal into something it isn't. If you don't want tons of gain, you probably don't want 4 cascaded JFET gain stages. So maybe instead of modding it you talk him into selling it and build the poor guy a TS808 or something else more like the sound he's trying to get.

If he insists he wants to keep this pedal and mod it more to his liking, definitely start with the bias adjustment and go from there, as bias will affect multiple aspects of the tone.

I hope there was something at least moderately helpful in there

Completely off-topic P.S. - A friend took me to a Belgian waffle place for breakfast once and the creme fraiche turned an otherwise good meal into an excellent meal

[willienillie]

Completely off-topic P.S. - A friend took me to a Belgian waffle place for breakfast once and the creme fraiche turned an otherwise good meal into an excellent meal

Was there a shake weight?  Did it give you cab fare?