Does overdrive suck the body out of your tone?

[cheeb]

Not quite the same, but I put a clean blend into an SD-1 and it really livened it up and made it more organic.

[cpnyc23]

Hey Cheeb - how did you do the blend?  Did you use a buffer to split the signal and then a resistive mixer to combine the signals after processing? 

-chris

[cheeb]

Just this layout. Send and return were the effect in/out, I believe.

[cpnyc23]

Excellent!

I'll definitely be giving this a shot in the coming weeks.

-chris

[JDoyle]

Sounds to me like you like the tone coming out of your compressor. You need to start there and figure out what that is doing to your signal.

But by definition, unless it is specifically frequency selective, a compressor is always going to give more body to your tone for the same reasons Mark mentioned that distortions CUT bass. Asking the same type of a response from a distortion, while maintaining 'touch' and picking dynamics, is asking a lot of any distortion. Especially as you seem to be wanting more low end, with is problematic for any distortion design for any number of reasons...

Honestly, I use a kinda-sorta Ross based compressor and make a very distinct point to practice WITHOUT it every third or fourth time to make sure that I still have a 'feel' for my 'real' tone.

Comps are great, I love them, but I equate them to blinders on a horse: they cover up so much that they make playing easy and sometimes effortless, but can also cover up the possible fire that is your 'actual' tone leaving you unaware that, at the core, your tone, simply, may suck.

I'm not saying that is the case with you at all, just that I think comps can be dangerous, the 'opiate of guitarists' if you will. :-)

But my advice stands, figure out how the comp is adjusting your tone and work from there in your distortion design. [Keep in mind that the frequency response of the FWR portion of the comp circuit is JUST AS IMPORTANT IF NOT MORE SO than the frequency response of the signal path, but the circuit's reaction to the FWR response will have the OPPOSITE effect on the output tone - cut highs in the FWR and they are boosted in the circuit]

Regards,

Jay Doyle

[Joe Kramer]

Maybe you could try a blend, and blend in just enough of your clean tone to get some of that body back.

Plus-one on the clean blend.  I've just rebuilt my overdrive to include this with happy results.  Not only do you get the body of the sound back, you get much wider dynamic range, similar to what a real tube amp does.  But the greatest benefit in my case, is that the clean blend allows me to run a Fuzz Face into the overdrive without maxxing the overdrive into total sludge.  The clean side allows the higher output of the fuzz to pass unchanged, while the overdrive side simply ducks to nearly-audible level.  This more-or-less retains the character of the fuzz, and (for me) solves the dilemma of which order to connect those two effects.

BTW, It's very interesting to see the action of the blend control on an o-scope.  You would expect some kind of drastic conflict of the two very different waveforms as they are superimposed, but in fact the transition between clean and distorted is amazingly smooth.  A sine wave gently rounds out on top as the control is gradually turned to the dirty side, and this happens in a way that would be tricky to achieve with unmixed distortion alone.  I expect this to be useful with other instruments besides guitars--for instance, keyboards, or for recording drums or vocals, etc. . . .

Regards,
Joe

[wampcat1]

running some resistance in parallel with the clipping diodes works well too.
bw

[Caferacernoc]

Why not just tack a bass boost on the end, after the clipping stage, of a tubescreamer type overdrive? Especially considering that the chip is a dual opamp.

[blester]

I feel the same way about screamers sucking your tone.  You can barely hear the difference when you switch pickups.  My favorite Strat effect is a Marshal Blues Breaker clone.  I set the drive at 12:00 and it adds just a bit of crunch on the clean channel of my HRD.  All five pickup switch positions still sound like a Strat.   The GGG boards are R.G.'s design I believe.  Tonepad also sells a board.  Easy build, my favorite build to date.

bl

[cpnyc23]

Why not just tack a bass boost on the end, after the clipping stage, of a tubescreamer type overdrive? Especially considering that the chip is a dual opamp.

Its no so much the lack of bass as a frequency band, but rather the depth of the bottom end.  I think what I'm really trying to preserve is some of the sound before it goes into the OD.

-chris

[Caferacernoc]

Why not just tack a bass boost on the end, after the clipping stage, of a tubescreamer type overdrive? Especially considering that the chip is a dual opamp.

Its no so much the lack of bass as a frequency band, but rather the depth of the bottom end.  I think what I'm really trying to preserve is some of the sound before it goes into the OD.

-chris

In that case you basically need to increase the input and output cap size of your overdrive until it no longer cuts bass. You might like a MXR Dist+/DOD OD250 type circuit tuned with "fullrange caps" and maybe LED diodes for great headroom. I modded a Ross distortion pedal, similar circuit, that way and it was really transparent EQ wise. I used 1uf film for the caps and changed the diodes to 3 GE diodes one way and 5 the other for the clipping. I also doubled the size of the treble cut capacitor. When you set the gain at 1/3rd and the volume at 2/3 this pedal really sounded like the amp you fed it to just turned up more.

[cpnyc23]

When you set the gain at 1/3rd and the volume at 2/3 this pedal really sounded like the amp you fed it to just turned up more.

That's the kind of thing I'm looking for...
-chris

[aron]

>The interesting thing with using the noninverting configuration in opamps, is remember that no matter what kind of filtering/gain/clipping you put in the feedback loop, the ouput will always show a gain of 1 to the signal going in the non inverting input.

That explains my comments re: the first Shaka Pedal.