Anyone have any DS-1 mods other than fuzzcentral?

[JIG]

I have never heard of this mod before either. Sounds interesting. What would happen in you left the diodes and did the tone control mod? I think I will try it and let you know.

JIG

I recommended the following to a guy over at Ampage who wanted some DS-1 mods:

The picture of the board indicates that the two diodes responsible for the clipping action are D4 and D5, which are located exactly in the geographic middle of the board, smack between two big caps and an FET (Q7, a 2SK30, probably labelled K30).

For the least coloration possible, you probably want to not only lift the diodes to eliminate clipping, but also bypass the tone control since it introduces some coloration even when you try to make it as clean/normal-sounding as possible. The simplest fix here seems to be to cut the connection between C12 (0.1uf) and R16 (6.8k). I'll explain why.

The tone control is set up very much like the Big Muff Pi tone control. In the BMP, the signal is split before the tone control so it goes through a simple highpass and simple lowpass filter. The tone control then pans between the outputs of each section to produce combinations of lowpass and highpass output. Lifting the connection between C12 and R16 (while leaving R16 intact) would mean that when your tone control is turned all the way towards the bass end, it would take all the output of what used to be the lowpass filter (and which is now full bandwidth) and pass that on to the volume control. There is still a path for the highpass section via the other side of the tone pot, but for a variety of reasons, what has to pass through there will end up contributing very little to your tone when the tone pot is fully bass-wise. On the other hand, as you start to turn your tone control towards the treble side, you will keep your low end and especially your lower mids, and simply add in more high end for a bit more bite.