quick and dirty dunlop classic dist mod

[pinkjimiphoton]

 a friend brought me one of these asking if i could make it more "metal" yesterday.

so i lied, pretending i know what metal is, and said "sure",

involved changing two parts.... add a 3mm green led in series with the right clipping diode

parallel the cap between pins 1 and 3 or 2 and 4... can't remember, but there's only one cap there, a small box.... 22n i think...
anyways, just tack on a 220n cap to the connections on the underside of the board (i did it that way so it was easy to undo if he didn't like it)

makes it crunch a lot more, decent volume boost (it gets crazy loud above half way on the volume) and apparently definitely "more metal".

if anyone is foolhardy enough to try it, let me know what ya think. made my old kustom sound pretty good

[bluebunny]

No SPT?   

[Cozybuilder]

PJ-
Dunlop acquired MXR awhile back, is this anything like the schematic of the pedal you modified?

[Luke51411]

You should have replaced any carbon film resistors with metal film of the same value and done nothing else.

[pinkjimiphoton]

No SPT?   

[pinkjimiphoton]

PJ-
Dunlop acquired MXR awhile back, is this anything like the schematic of the pedal you modified?

it was so quick-n-dirty i didn't pay much attention. similar a little, different opamp. it  was like a 30 second mod. literally.
i didn't have my glasses on even. i saw what looked like a small cap in the feedback loop of the opamp... 4.7n i think. he wanted more distortion, more "metal"...so i made it a thousand times bigger for more bass to get in and distort more. and it sure seemed to work. takes it almost up to fuzz land, which is what he wanted.
fwiw, it looked like it had buffered in and out, there was a bunch of transistors on the board too but i didn't even look at them. i was just looking to help my friend make the pedal more metal.
also appeared to have a somewhat big muff pi style tone circuit. if i had more time, i would have paid more attention, but i was in a rush to get the guy happy and had to fix a couple frets for him while he was there... it was a freebie gig, which i don't mind generally. his cousin was working upstairs in my kitchen and i needed to get 'er done so the guys could leave.

i wan't impressed by the pedal at all. it was rather like an anemic scooped ubete reamerspe, hard to dial in a GREAT tone, tho there were several useable one... for me... but i play at concert pitch with light strings with my guitar barely on and my amp cranked up, and he plays metal downtuned to the key of "awesome"...seriously, his words...with heavy bottom light top strings with his guitar dimed, his preamp dimed, and his marshalls barely idling.... for him, not surprisingly, there's not much of a "boost" and it sounds like an "overdrive". of course, when you're playing what would look like pulse modulated square waves already, where can you go? you can either get more distorted, more compressed... or you accept the dang thing is full tilt boogie and look for frequency areas to exploit. this is what i did, and why it works for his benefit, as it DOES give a BIGASS BASS BOOST noticeable even to his shredder ears. if ya can't bring up the top of the clipped off wave, well, make the median wider and more lardacious.

whatever. it works if a brave soul wants to go there. he reports thru the jcm 900 a huge improvement in baalz... not a surprise, really, as it's now louder with a couple less octaves of bass roll off. he's supposed to get back to me about the mode 4 quad stack... if it "sounds more metal" there, it may be considered a worthy mod to add to the ol' bag of tricks.

peace!