Op-amp clipping way too early?

[edvard]

As I stated before, I'm going for high gain, not Fuzz, and that's what I get (and a bunch of noise) with four stages running, even at lower gains.  3 seems to be a magic number; nice grind-y distortion without a bunch of fizz but with an acceptable noise floor.

if you think the distortion is to fuzz like but still want more gain, just take out some bass. the recommended frequency is generally thought off as 700Hz, but its a starting point, not a fixed rule to use that frequency.
a simple first order filter will do the trick

cheers, Iain

*calculates cap for 700Hz*

Holy shimoleans!  220 pF?  OK...
Oof.  Razor blades.  So many razor blades... 

OK, I did a little experimenting, and 1nF is about the tipping point where I get the feeling that too much bass starts to get lost.  I may change my mind before this experiment is tied up, however; 500pF didn't sound horrible, but I'd definitely have to re-think the tone stack.  BTW, it didn't affect the clipping.  I think I can live with just x5 gain; it only crackles at extremes, which won't mess much with the tone of the CMOS distortion, and I'm going to probably have a separate op-amp for the clean channel anyway.

...
I like to say that most of the signal, or at least a lot of it, "lives in the basement".

Very true, and exactly what I discovered when trying to simultaneously cut some "flub" AND boost the high end of a long-ago experiment.  I found that cutting the bass allowed for even more gain without crapping out which then boosted the treble linearly and relatively at the same time.  Who'dathunkit?

[amptramp]

This still doesn't answer the question of why a seemingly normal preamp stage run from ±12 VDC supplies runs out of headroom with a guitar signal.  This is where I recommend getting an oscilloscope with at least 10 MHz bandwidth (preferably more) to find out what is going on.  If your entire selection of op amps does this, it seems to point to an outside source of RF energy or feedback in whatever method you use for measurement.  You may be changing your circuit bandwidth to alleviate a circuit problem that shouldn't be there.