Red Llama build report

[stm]

Hi!

Last night I was in the mood for some prototyping and build the Red LLama to give it a try, since I liked the samples available, heard good comments about it, and loved its simplicity--very DIY friendly!

I used the exact components as shown in the circuit, except for the CD4049 which I substituted with a CD4069UBE due to availability.

GREAT SOUNDS came out from this simple circuit.  Very warm, with some glassy high end.  It came a lot closer to some Hendrix recordings than a Miss Piggy F-F I had tried before.

I have an Epiphone Les Paul-styled guitar with two humbuckers.  My guitar has too much bass content to my liking, so only the bridge pickup gave good sounds to me.  But very good sounds indeed.  I could play 6-string chords with lots of clarity through my solid-state Fender amp.

Tonight I will try lowering the 68 nF and 33 nF caps to 47 nF and 22 nF, respectively, to see if it suits better my guitar.

Also, in the TODO list, I have to fix my oscilloscope to look at the waveforms.

Regards,

STM

[MartyMart]

Sounds nice stm, any links to it and perhaps pictures ??
I have the same problem with my Epiphone 335 dot, far too much bass end for me too !, that mod should help a bit.
Cheers and Happy new year !!
Marty.

[stm]

Hi,

I just build it on a protoboard, not on a box, so pictures are not interesting at this point  :oops:

The schematic is the same that's been liying around.

Now I feel in the mood for some tweaking of the circuit.  As it is, I think it is great for chord work, assuming I fix somewhat the excess low end of my guitar.  Maybe I will try a third stage to have some extra juice for lead playing.

Regarding the excess bass, two guitarists I have lended my guitar have found it great (and have heard no negative opinions so far), so I don't want to get rid of it, but I want to fix the bassiness.  One thing I did in the past with very good results was using a GE-7 equalizer just after the guitar: Highs boosted, Mids cut, Lows flat.  Similar to a Fender stack equalization.  This worked very nice for clean chord playing.  Unfortunately I sold my seven Boss pedals and bought a digital Boss multieffect (YUCK!).  This was about 10 years ago--didn't know what I was doing!... Now I also sold my multieffect and I am building analog pedals from scratch, but that's another story...

Regards,

STM

[MartyMart]

If you can find one, the Boss PQ-4 is very useful, quiet also !
There's sure to be a few "Eq's" that you could build as well, RDV has a nice three band eq, as a tone stack, but i'm sure you could build it just as an eq pedal ?
I think there's also a passive one in Craig Andertons book, "Electronics projects for musicians"
They are nice to use before and after overdrive, gives an instant idea for subbing caps, i/o of your circuit.

Marty.

[MartyB]

Hey Marty,

  Not strictly on-topic, but  have you tried your epi with a rangemaster?  Mine is like magic with the RM and small tube amps.  Nice warm, jangly sounds - nail that Youngbloods sound, takes the bass down where you want it.  

The other Marty,

[MartyMart]

Hey Marty,

  Not strictly on-topic, but  have you tried your epi with a rangemaster?  Mine is like magic with the RM and small tube amps.  Nice warm, jangly sounds - nail that Youngbloods sound, takes the bass down where you want it.  

The other Marty,

Well I have a "Brian may treble boost" which is quite similar right?
that does sound great with the 335, causes a nice bit of "break-up" infront of the Matamp C7  :wink:

Marty ( A )  ?  ( C ) perhaps !

[stm]

OK fellows, I modded the Llama to see if I could take out the excess bass of my guitar.  These are the results of my experimentation done last night:

1) I ended up reducing the original 68nF and 33 nF caps 10x down!  Now they are 6n8 and 3n3, respectively.  The sound now is OK for playing with the neck pickup, and crispy and good for screaming leads with the bridge pickup.  Perhaps in terms of frequency response it went much closer to a tube screamer!

2) Of course overall maximum gain was somewhat reduced, so I added a third stage made of a 33nF series cap and a 1Mohm feedback resistor.  Now this thing screams like a charm!  There are lots of gain and sustain now. If I turn the gain pot to minimum there is still plenty of gain, but still adequate for chord work.

3) As a side effect, I notice removing the 51pF and 100pF feedback caps didn't make a huge difference, as opposed to OpAmp clippers.  There is some serious high frequency limitation built in into the CD4069UB, thus when you remove bass, you have basically mid boost and a tube-screamer-like sound.

4) A nice feature of this little circuit is that the Guitar VOL pot interacts nicely with the input stage effectively reducing gain.

5) On the down side, I must say the sound now is over compressed, with little dynamics.  Gotta think of a way of solving this.

This is what I can inform for now.

STM.

[bobbletrox]

You can also increase the gain of the (original two-stage) circuit by increasing the 100K feedback resistor in the first feedback loop.  A 1Meg resistor will give you something similar to the lead channel of Craig Anderson's Tube Sound Fuzz.  Add a footswitch to switch channels on the fly!

[dansamp]

where can i find the schematic for the red llama

[stm]

You can also increase the gain of the (original two-stage) circuit by increasing the 100K feedback resistor in the first feedback loop.  A 1Meg resistor will give you something similar to the lead channel of Craig Anderson's Tube Sound Fuzz.  Add a footswitch to switch channels on the fly!

Very nice hint!

[Fret Wire]

Regarding the excess bass, two guitarists I have lended my guitar have found it great (and have heard no negative opinions so far), so I don't want to get rid of it, but I want to fix the bassiness.  

Sounds like you need a pickup adjustment to balance the output between the treble and bass strings. With single coils (strat type), you'd adjust the pickup so it's angled, height wise, treble side closer to the strings. On your Epi, you can adjust the whole pickup up and down on each side, plus the pole pieces are adjustable.

First, use a ruler and record the total pickup height above it's surround. Then record the distance from each pole piece to the bottom of the strings when fretted at the 12th fret. Now you have a baseling you can go back to if you aren't happy with your adjustments.

Now, you can lower the base string polepieces, or raise the treble string polepieces untill the bass response is lowered and more even.

If the pickups aren't adjusted right, it's better to address that issue first than to adjust the fx.