something newish from something old, and a question...

[pinkjimiphoton]

a bud was talking about a fuzz he had a dream about, and i was bored so i decided to draw something up.

many years ago i stole adapted culture jam's dead easy dirt 386 distortion into what i called the "stiff hippy"... i was f'in around with it on my bench for shits n grins, and as a candidate for an overdrive pedal for MLA, and said... hmmm...

cris wanted fuzz, gain, filter and a switch to choose si, both with a blend pot, or ge clipping. since the stiff hippy had a "philter" on it already, i was like... wellp... lets do a little cookbookin'.

so cuz he wanted to be able to "blend" between two kinds of hard clippers, i remembered my "transmission overdrive" from days of yore, and decided to incorporate it into the circuit, changing from the fixed asym ge/si clipping in the stiff hippy. easy breezy. lotta ball head scratching involved, as to do the switching between the clippers, WITH a pot in the middle was significantly above my 10,000 monkeys paygrade ( lieber mein abschnicke!!)
at first i thought i could do it with just a toggle switch and a pot. yeah, right.

so i called up my brother wes from the band, an EE to see what he suggested. he could not understand what the hell i was trying to do, of course, but suggested doing it with a chip of some sort, and came up with a design using two dpdt's. i looked at it and said... nope. nah gah happah.

it was a real ball breaker. i mean, for such a simple thing, that's a LOT of connections that need to be swapped around. drew up a bunch of unfunctional but amusingly close circuits, but NO-O, CAN'T BE THAT EASY, PINK!!

FINALLY in a fit of temporary lucidity amidst the hot-smokin' sassafrass poluting the dungeon and my mind, i saw the light... one rotary switch, 4p3t which is fairly easy to find, and it could work... tho it seems kinda overkill to do it.

anyways, all that led to this thing below.
the philter looks @#$%ed up and it is, but its like that for a reason. its a damn 386, no where to put any other kind of tone control. this is for all intents like using the guitar tone pot to shave off some high end, and worked great. so i left it, as per the original design, tho i bumped the cap up to 27n from the original 3.3n that barely was noticeable on the original one.

i changed the input cap from 220n to 10n, and the output cap from 4.7u to 33n. made a WORLD of difference tonally, and took it from a fuzz bomb to a nice marshally overdrive kinda sound.  cris wants fuzz, so his will have the original values which are way more of a fuzz bomb than what i currently consider useful. so you can make it either way, or add a second footswitch to choose between overdrive or fuzz bomb if ya want to. i didn't include that possibility, but its fairly easy to implement if someone was dumb crazy inclined enough to include that.

the switching lets ya choose hard clipping with si/schotkee/led/mosfet whatever, or asym germanium <takes rougly 6 ge diodes to equal a pair of si diodes, here we use 5> or, in the middle, a pan pot from my venerable transmission overdrive to pan between the two different clippers. easy breezy.

standard 100k output pot. i used a 386 n on it, but a 386 is a 386 for this purpose.

and anyways, this is what i ended up with:




it sounds great, feels good.... nice little overdriver with a fairly decent response, for a 386 dirt box. there's not a whole lot ya can really do with these... lol

anyways.. my billion dollar question... is there an easier/more eloquent/more elegant way to implement the clipper switching? this seemed the easiest way to me to do it, but i am SURE i'm not doing it the best way...

has to be just one switch, so the rotary seemed the only way to fly. i was kinda thinking maybe a hex inverter as a switch? i dunno. remember, i am an blithering stimpy-esque idiot.

if ya breadboard it, let me know. its been a while since i posted anything "new"...figured wtf!

enjoy, endure, or flame. peace, fellow travelers...

[iainpunk]

nice write up,
looking at teh switch setup, switch D is redundant, it does the same when you just hard wire the wiper to the middle lug of the switch.

cheers

[pinkjimiphoton]

no, you'd think that, but switch d.... son of a bitch, yep, you're right... !!
lol

yeah, its a holdover from the original f-up... i was switching the wiper out originally, but if ya switch the poles 1 and 3, yep, no need to switch the wiper too. awesome.

thanks iain!!!!!!

[iainpunk]

using an on/both/on switch:


i used the 50k from your schematic, but wouldn't it be better to use lower value?
and also, there is no resistance coming form the opamp, a 100r to 1k might be ''propper'' and keep the diode current under control.

cheers

[pinkjimiphoton]

using an on/both/on switch:


i used the 50k from your schematic, but wouldn't it be better to use lower value?
and also, there is no resistance coming form the opamp, a 100r to 1k might be ''propper'' and keep the diode current under control.

cheers

yeah, the original transmission od used a 10k blend pot, 1k or 5k probably better. i haven't tacked that part on to the circuit yet in reality. i've built it as an od without the switching, using 2 1n914 on one side and one 1n34a.

but looking at the schematic you posted, isn't the pot always ultimately in the circuit ? if it is, won't it cause leakage between the two? he doesn't want a warp control, he wants a pan control to go between the two clippers. the way you have it drawn is the way i first tried to do it, but in that case, the resistance of the pot is always in the circuit on one side or the other.
it needs to be si one side, ge on the other, and a blend in the middle, so i'm not sure this way will work. if memory serves, jack from amz posted this kinda deal as a warp control or something, adding a variable resistance in series with the hard clipper will soften it quite a bit, won't it?

cris wants hard clipping with a pan control, this is a bit different in this application i think.

i'm workin up a vero so i can knock one together for him. see how it goes

thanks, bro!

[iainpunk]

cris wants hard clipping with a pan control, this is a bit different in this application i think.

i'm workin up a vero so i can knock one together for him. see how it goes

thanks, bro!

if the switch is in the middle, you can warp between the clippers, but moving the switch to either side just disconnects one clipper, you still have the pot to soften either clipper. i don't think that your schematic truly is a pan control either, if you want a ''true'' pan control, try this:

still with an on/on/on switch.
the low value resistors remove the interaction between the clippers and the pot, making it a true pan.

cheers

[pinkjimiphoton]

yep, gotcha, kinda what i thought. he doesn't wanna soften it, he wants it as nasty as possible lol.

i will look into the pan, thanks brother. for all intents, the thing i got is gonna work well enough for this pos fuzzular, i think. it was pretty noticeable with 914 and 4001's in the original, so should be good for this project. i'm all about easy, but its possible i f'd up this here vero. there's no option for rotary switches with diylc, at least not the venerable version i'm using. i believe it's right tho.

i made it a 3p3t instead of a 3p4t like i had in the original schematic. i believe it should be good to go if anybody is brave, bored, and willing to @#$% around with it. i am gonna knock it up as soon as i can, i gotta do some builds for mla tonite, and i've gotta deluxe reverb and a godin acousticaster i gotta get off my bench first. so may be a couple of days.

thanks for the support!




here's the original stiff hippy




and its vero





and the transmission fuzz from way back when





and its vero





its possible the stiff hippy and transmission overdrive veros have some mistakes, i really used to suck at this more than i do now. i ALWAYS got pots backwards... so caveat emptor

[iainpunk]

its possible i f'd up this here vero.

should have used perf, its better in every way, haha

i hope you get it to work for that friend of yours.

cheers

[pinkjimiphoton]

every time i ever tried to use perf, it seems i contaminate the joints with the perf itself or something.

trust me, better with vero lol

it will work. it already does. just gotta @#$% around with the switching a little (if necessary) but the actual box minus that sounds great.

[iainpunk]

nice that it sounds great! do you have sound samples?

if you use high grid sand paper on the perf before soldering, the solder sticks better to the pads and soldering becomes a breeze. even lead-free stuff solders easy on a  perf board.

congrats on your 1000th like, i just gave you 1001.

cheers

[pinkjimiphoton]

thanks for the tip and the like

alas, no can do clips right now. my phone is too old, and my computer's sound is bloody abysmal for some reason.
but i'll see if i can get some eventually. the stiff hippy is on my youtube.com/666pinkster i believe, the original one from a gazillion years ago.