Gain

trendyironicname · October 27, 2007, 03:13:52 AM

Hi all. I just got done building my first legitimate distortion. It's just basically a transistor amplifier clipping into a modified marshall tones stack that has the mids moved to about 300. Totally newbie question, I have it sounding sweet on my rig but i took it to my girlfriends house and it sounded neutered. It was in front of a little practice amp of hers as opposed to my full stack but I think it has more to do with the guitars. She has a Les Paul her dad gave her and it's quite sweet. While mine's a lesser guitar, (wow, talk about neutered

) it has extremely hotter pickups. (stock gibson versus 81/85 EMG actives with 18v series pumped into em). It's absolutely beautiful to my ears on my guitar but I would like to make it more, i guess you could say, consistent. I know that the amps had stuff to do with the overall sound, but alot of the character was gone.
Buffer? Direction?

I promise that if I ever get as good as you guys, I'll contribute more than questions to this site.

Won't always be a moocher.

The only advice I can think of to contribute is to remove power from the circuit before resoldering.

Silly electricity always wanting to get to ground.

ambulancevoice · October 27, 2007, 04:09:35 AM

could i see a schematic??

darron · October 27, 2007, 04:28:24 AM

do you think it could be that the distortion sound that you heard while prototyping was for a large part just the gain that you created driving your amp and causing the distortion there? maybe try putting a simple volume control after your effect and turning it down. the volume should go down but the distortion shouldn't. if the volume and distortion goes down then it's because you are driving. i could be really wrong as i'm a bit of a noob myself (:

also, i'd be very interested to see the schematic just for curiosity.

trendyironicname · October 28, 2007, 01:05:13 AM

I took a transistor and fed the collector back through the base with a blue led. Back before I had my own computer, I read about the diode position from someone that needs to be thanked but I can't remember the page for anything. If I come across it again, I'll post it. It had alot of useful stuff I filed away in my brain. I read about this tone stack calculator, http://www.duncanamps.com/tsc/ from around here, I think. It was more the fender stack than the marshall, oops, but I found a curve I kind of wanted through a graphic and went to work trying to figure it's values for components. Closest I got was c1- 220p, c2-100n,c3-68n, r2-100k, r3 became a single 330k resistor and r4-10k. I know this probably sucks as an explanation but spice keeps giving me fits right now so I can't draw it out. That calculator is golden though. It's basically just that circuit with those components.

ambulancevoice · October 28, 2007, 06:28:42 PM

what about bias resistors, input caps???

trendyironicname · October 29, 2007, 10:28:33 AM

Sitting at school. The input is a 4.7. Just a 100k on the collector. Guess I could scan my print at the library sometime. Maybe someone will recognize it.

Electric_Death · October 29, 2007, 01:56:15 PM

My experience with practice amps is they don't do very well with a distortion that doesn't have a MASSIVE amount of gain and a handful of voicing options aside from a simple tone stack. Anything under 25-30 watts RMS and you need either a heavy duty multi effects unit like the Zoom G2 or something like the Death Metal Pedal or better yet, a Sansamp.
I've got 3 little practice amps and know to overdrive the 2 lower wattage ones, I'll have to custom build something for them. That's not to say the pedal I build for them won't kick butt on a high wattage amp, they just needs something built to make up for their lack of balls.

My concept is to use a dual op amp with a gain of 1000 run through a tone stack and maybe use the second stage for an active bandpass or cab sim. Build something like that and your gf's practice amp should come to life.

trendyironicname · October 29, 2007, 02:38:00 PM

It's making me feel better now. Thanks for the amp tip. Think I'll put that one in with a switch to bypass it just so I can be like, "see how much better?" I know her quote will be, "i don't hear any difference." But she'll like me more. Better tone=more inspiration=better riffs=playing at her house more often=her kissing me more often
Girls are like house cats and guitars are like newspaper.
They won't you pet them just because you want to, but start reading a newspaper, and they won't leave you alone.

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