GGG Guv'nor vs. orginal Marshall Guv'nor

[Bucksears]

Has anyone A/B'd the two to compare them? I've never played the original, but the GGG one I built a few years ago sounded pretty good. I'm inquiring because I'm wondering how close the two are in terms of components/sound.

Thanks,

[sjaltenb]

Hello,

check this video out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ne_YxAMuR4

Hope this helps

[Ripthorn]

I have an original, but never played a GGG.  I like it well enough, but it doesn't get much use after some recent builds.

[Baktown]

I have a new Guv'nor 2 I bought on Ebay for $30 USD, and I think it sounds a lot crunchier than either of these. 

Rick J

[Joe Kramer]

Hi!

I haven't built the GGG Guv'nor, but perfboarded my own straight off the stock schematic.  I don't know what type of parts the GGG version recommends, but the original blackbox Guv'nors use ceramic caps throughout, whereas I used film caps.  I was able to compare mine to two original blackbox Guv'nors, a British-made and a Korean-made one.  I preferred my film caps version by far--sounded bigger, rounder, fuller, more dynamic to my ear.

BTW, a great deal of the Guv'nor's distortion comes from the op amp itself.  After a lot of A/Bing different op amps, I wound up swapping out the stock TL072 for a JRC1458.  I chose the 1458 for several reasons.  The 072 was just too hard and brittle for my taste.  The 1458 distorted sooner and more smoothly, which also took some of the hard edge off the LED clipping stage, and this gave a more compressed "chunky" sort of sound overall.  Also, the distortion from the 1458 was more asymmetrical (even harmonics) than the the 072.  (Some other op amps I tried were perfectly symmetrical, producing all odd harmonics.)   The only problem I had with the 1458 was a bit of RF interference, but this was easily fixed with a 100pf cap from the first op amp's input to ground.  Lastly, the 1458 had about half the current draw, so the pedal only uses about 1.5 mA on batteries.

Hope some of this helps.

Regards,
Joe

[bootsytakes6]

I built a GGG Guv' Nor, never played through an orignal. I wound up using it for parts after I built the Umble from Runoffgroove.com.