Opinions on modding a Green Ringer into a booster/octave effect

[Derringer]

Since I built a Superfuzz, I've been interested in octave effects. I've breadboarded a Scrambler and a Green Ringer to get ideas of what's what.

What I'm thinking is that I'd like to build a Green Ringer with an adjustable boost, probably a treble boost of sorts, for lead work. What I don't want to do is reduce the octave effect. I want it to boost and retain the octave sound. I imagine that I would be placing the new circuit before my main distortion device. That positioning seemed to work best when I was just using the stock Green Ringer design.

I'm thinking that I could either adjust the resistor values around Q1 to get a greater boost or I could add an additional LPB or Treble boost circuit right before Q3. I'm thinking that a Range Master/Omega circuit would be cool so that I could tweak the treble response.

I'm assuming that Q3 of the Green Ringer is acting as an output buffer... right?


So what do you all think? Mess with Q1? Put another stage immediately before Q3? Derringer you idiot, you can't do that because ... !
Something completely different?

Please post what you think.

Thanks

[earthtonesaudio]

I would suggest making Q3 like Q1.  It's currently just a buffer, so make it into a gain stage.  Hopefully that won't mess with the octave.

[nokaster]

what i do is put a "woodrow" booster in front of the ringer.
gives me a range of octafuzz - octadrive - clean octave with a twist of the volume knob on my teles...

[Derringer]

earthtonesaudio: you're right, I didn't consider that ... but it might be nice to have a buffer on the end to nicely drive whatever follows ... have to experiment and see


nokaster: what is a "woodrow" booster? schem ?

[nokaster]

it's a modded electra distortion, sold by "pedallover" 

i like this in front of a ringer, because it's very sensitive to the volumeknob of the guitar.
transistor choice is important for the gain and drive you want.

add the woodrow in front of the ringer with a 200hfe transistor and you get:
- nasty fuzz when playing on the bridge pickup with the guitars volume at 10
- more octave on the neckpickup, maybe turn done the tone on the guitar a little for even more..
- clean octave on the neckpickup when the guitarvolume is at about 7, depending on the gain of your pickups.

[earthtonesaudio]

If you want more flexibility, go ahead and put a boost before the 'ringer, but put a low-pass tone control after the boost.  Octave effects like this one work well when you roll off the highs, like Nokaster mentioned.  Sometimes it's nice to have that control on the pedal rather than having to fiddle with the guitar.

[nokaster]

another advantage of the woodrow... it's quit bassy!
i've tried several fuzz, boost en overdrive circuits in front of the ringer.
the woody to me sounds best and is most versatily.

it isn't a bad dirty booster... you could make it a double pedal with 2 stompswitches...
i just wire the output of the booster to the input of the ringer.

[John Lyons]

You might want to tack the boost onto the end of the ringer.
This way the ringer is untouched and will work the same as stock
if you use a switch to toggle between the boost and "stock".

The boost could use a small output cap if you want a treble boost.
Or you could use the Jack Orman tweaked "Simply wonderfull tone
control" to boost the treble variably between treble and full range boost (See AMZ link above)
Just chose your boost circuit...

john

[Derringer]

cool ... thanks for all the insight so far folks!

I think that for my first attempt, I'll tack an LPB style boost onto the end of the ringer

from there, I'll see what I can do about, if I need to, accentuating the treble frequencies .. perhaps even something like the Omega there

The idea of adjusting the ringer's input (LP tone control) to accentuate the fundamental, thus accentuating the octave response, seems like an idea to pursue here as well ... something to tweak the octave

Cool .. I think I've got a good place to start

Finally though, while daydreaming in one of my grad classes today, I thought about running a blend circuit after the ringer, one leg taking just the ringer's normal output signal and the other leg going to the booster and of course blending them back together for the final output... I imagine that I'd have to deal with signal inversion in this instance? That's all probably overkill though

but this idea led to another of running a blended Ringer with a null mod (that mod reduces the fundamental in the output right?), where one side of the blend is the clean input signal, with a loop on the nulled ringer side where you could plug in a modulation device of some sort (flange, phase, delay, pick your poison) so that the octave gets it's own modulation while the clean blended signal retains strong fundamentals. I think that would probably sound pretty damn cool as long as the modulation device was able to do its thing to those high frequencies.

Are there any threads anyone can think of where someone pursued a ringer/blend idea like these two here?

Thanks