Making Barber Direct Drive more transparent, can you help me out?

[Burstbucker]

I've got the original Barber Direct Drive pedal from 3-4 years ago, plain black box with hand-drawn script in white. I was wondering what the differences were between the regular Direct Drive and the Direct Drive SS?


Ideally, I'd like to make the Direct Drive a little bit more neutral-sounding, EQ-wise, like the LTD that I just purchased. Man, I love the LTD!

Did I read something about an add-on mod board for the Direct Drive? That would be so cool, especially if Dave Barber would sell the board and let the pedal owner install it himself. Does this infact exist?

I did do the "extended highs" and "presence" mods, I put a toggle switch for each function on the side of my pedal. Looks pretty good too.

With these switches in the off position, I'm getting the stock Direct Drive tones. I tried the "deep bass" mod but it was just too much low end.

I think the thing I want to change the most on my Direct Drive is to tame or tweak the mids, I think that would give me a more neutral sound, which would be more useful to me. There's just something about the EQ that isn't quite right for me and I'd like to change it more to my liking. I wish there was a mod for midrange in the "Tweaks" section of the Direct Drive on Barber's site.

For the record, I do think that the Direct Drive is a very good pedal and I won't be getting rid of it.  I was just wondering if anybody here knows how to go about making this pedal more transparent?

[petemoore]

  without schem, you can look for caps between signal path and ground, reduce or eliminating them will reduce the LP Filtering [more highs].
  notch filter to rid mids? I think I'd try the LP value changes...

[Burstbucker]

Thanks Pete!

I don't have pictures of my own pedal but here's a link to Barber's "tweaks" page for the Direct Drive, if that helps any.

http://www.barberelectronics.com/Tweaks%20page.htm

[George Giblet]

> I was wondering what the differences were between the regular Direct Drive and the Direct Drive SS?

*As far as I can tell* the SS model is almost identical to the regular DD.  It appears the SS has the presence and deep bass mods, except the resistors are replaced by pots on the PCB.  The bass mods and air mods are not present.

As far as the LTD goes it looks a lot like the SS.  One pic of the LTD I saw looked like some diodes were missing but that could have been the camera angle.  If you can post some clear/close pictures of the LTD board from the top and perhaps some other angles it shouldn't be hard to  pin down the difference more accurately.

[vortex]

Why not email Barber and ask ?

[Burstbucker]

I did email Barber but I think he's away because of illness, don't quote me on that though.

BTW, I sorted out my problem.  Actually I don't think excessive mids was my problem after all.  I added a .0068uF cap in parallel with the .01uF cap that's on the PCB just under the Tone knob.

This small increase in capacitance was just what I needed to tame-down what I heard as harshness in this pedal, with my rig anyways.  My Direct Drive now sounds awesome in my current setup.
8^)

[George Giblet]

I'm glad you sorted it out but.

> Actually I don't think excessive mids was my problem after all.  I added a .0068uF cap in parallel with the .01uF cap that's on the PCB just under the Tone knob.

As far as I'm aware that cap is not the low-pass (LP) cap petemoore mentioned it's the EQ section.

The added cap will reduce the mids a tad (I prefer your value to the original).

I wouldn't call it harshess, it's more muffledness and intermods.

[David Barber]

If the DD you have is an early unit with the resistors mounted on the push/pull switch, you could simply reduce the midrange/bass resistor on the right side of the switch. The blue 13.3k sets the mid/bass, so go with a 10k or less, the other resistor on the right side of the switch adjusts how much fatness is added when the harmonics are increased by the switch, you might leave that alone or adjust it as well.

I wanted to respond to this a while ago, but after surgery everybody here was limiting my daily output, and my password was vexing me

all should be better now, and feel free to ask away when you need advice on modding Barber pedals.

[Mark Hammer]

Welcome back to active duty!

[squidsquad]

Dave B.

Hope you are feeling fine & thank you for making fine pedals and supporting them here!

[aron]

David,

Thanks for jumping in. Take care and happy holidays!!!!!!!

I wish you continued success!

Aron