Enough distortions? Time to give it a rest?

[Steben]

Hah.  All these so called experts.  Y'know, people tell me that, in order to undo fuzz induced by positive ground PNP Germanium fuzzes, all you have to do is run it through negative ground NPN silicon fuzz.  Totally undoes it and returns your toanz to their NOS glory days.  Many people are telling me this.   

Its what they call biased

[davent]

Hah.  All these so called experts.  Y'know, people tell me that, in order to undo fuzz induced by positive ground PNP Germanium fuzzes, all you have to do is run it through negative ground NPN silicon fuzz.  Totally undoes it and returns your toanz to their NOS glory days.  Many people are telling me this.   

Didn't some guy put that up in all caps on Twitter?

[Mark Hammer]

Um, we're maybe starting to get a little too political.....says the guy who has the audacity to suggest there are too damn many clipping pedals being made. 

It's probably much too big a favour to ask, but the guy who would really know, just how many different overdrives, distortions, and fuzzes there are or have ever been made is Bart Provoost, who operates effectsdatabase.  The stats of interest for me would be:

a) what percentage of all known stompbox model, whether in production, or ever produced, are clipping pedals of one form or another?

b) how many new companies in the last 10 years begin their offerings with something that clips?

c) what proportion of distorting pedals produced  are:
  - unabashed copies/repros of some other older one
  - disguised copies of some older one
  - "improved" versions of an existing one
  - rather new designs that do not copy anything else that has been commercially available

But like I say, this would be a Herculean task.  Doesn't stop me from wondering, though.

[ElectricDruid]

But like I say, this would be a Herculean task.  Doesn't stop me from wondering, though.

Hey, that's what SQL queries are for, right?! Where there's a will there's a way...

[Mark Hammer]

That assumes, Tom, that every pedal in the database is coded for what it does.  Who knows.  Maybe this IS something Bart could do.

[Steben]

a) what percentage of all known stompbox model, whether in production, or ever produced, are clipping pedals of one form or another?

From 1960 to 65/66 100%? From then a wah, univibeand tons of fuzzes extra?

[kraal]

Hah.  All these so called experts.  Y'know, people tell me that, in order to undo fuzz induced by positive ground PNP Germanium fuzzes, all you have to do is run it through negative ground NPN silicon fuzz.  Totally undoes it and returns your toanz to their NOS glory days.  Many people are telling me this.   

It only works if you split your signal, run it through the two pedals in parallel and then blend it back (but remember to make them share the same power supply and connect the grounds of the two circuits together)

[LightSoundGeometry]

im not a fan of distortion but I like boosters to give natural tone of amp/guitar and push the amp when needed on the fly say in a live performance situation. if I wanted to color the amp i would use nasty fuzzes ! my .02

[pinkjimiphoton]

do we need more distortions?



dafuq? lol

of course we do. we need all kindsa new stuff.  more toob skreemers? maybe not so much... but every time i run into some weird new thing that makes me slightly tumescent, i think personally it is a good thing.

i still am actively building and designing stuff... and trying to find "new-ish" things or twist some applications in abby normal ways in search of new things.. and man, they ARE out there. shoot, you can mis-bias transistors and get all kindsa crazy stuff out of them that they "shouldn't " do. and i don't think there's any such thing as an invalid sound in some application or other. sometimes what seems to be pure crap can sound brilliant in the right context.

so i say build on... create. experiment. let the damn magick smoke out and keep trudging onward thru the fog. cuz innovation is always just around the corner. and there's myriad ways to exploit components to create distortions, including highly unorthadox techniques ya stumble across completely by accident.

i've got a bunch of 'em out there now, and they're somehow doing ok.

so keep 'em coming for them sickos like me that still can't get enough f'd up sounding circuits lol...

that said, being old, phat and lazy, i don't use pedals live anymore. les paul wireless and marshall, and that's it

jmo, ymmv and should. fascinating thread. peace out

[Fancy Lime]

OK, time to chime in.

"Enough distortions?  Time to give it a rest?"

NEVER! You can have my soldering iron when and if you pry it from my cold dead hands!

Not like there is anything wrong with clean guitar but boy do I love a good distortion sound. There is a lot of music that I like mostly for the guitar distortion sound. Also, building dirt boxes is fun. Necessary, no. Every conceivable distortion sound has been conceived long ago. But doing it all over again for myself is just so much fun. Also, has not everything been done, in some manner of looking at it. Does the world really need new cook books, carpet patterns, superhero movies...? Pop music is so derivative for the most part that one may argue that the whole genre is tediously redundant. I would agree yet an astonishing proportion of people seem to rather like a "new" Beonce (is that how you write that name? Beyoncey? Byoncee?) album every year or so. Or whatever it is that is popular these days.

Here's a proposal: I'll stop making unnecessary dirtboxes as soon as They stop making unnecessary and unoriginal clone music. Or at least stop playing it in supermarkets. Drives me nuts! Why can't we have a little Zeppelin or Sabbath every once in a while during grocery shopping?

[/grampa simpson rant]

In all seriousness, though: It would indeed be interesting to see how many different or "different" distortion type effect pedals there are. I would like to see a phylogenetic tree. I bet the people on this forum could create that if we manage to come up with an efficient way of doing it collaboratively. I know that there are collectors of pedals. They must have their own forum, right? I bet there are a bunch of people with enough OCD to have their entire collection categorized meticulously and put into a database with all the relevant info. Getting those data from a few collectors would probably give a decent estimate over the entire field of all stompboxes in existence. Does Reverb keep track of what they are selling by category? That should be useful as well.

Cheers and keep driving,
Andy

[ElectricDruid]

I would like to see a phylogenetic tree. I bet the people on this forum could create that if we manage to come up with an efficient way of doing it collaboratively.

This is a fascinating idea - a evolutionary tree of stompbox distortion designs, starting with early boosters and fuzzes, and then developing them into more complex circuits, adding bits, taking bits away, etc etc. Meanwhile, other trees sprout from some new root somewhere nearby.

I guess the problem is that unlike animals, stomp boxes *don't* actually reproduce one from another (although looking at several of the collections around here, it might not feel like it ) so there's only occasionally genuine "evolution" from one design to another. Many designs would at least *claim* to be original. Still, even a basic timeline grouping similar circuits would be interesting.

[Steben]

Afaik, the voltage feedback bias circuit aka fuzz face, simply existed as mic or phono input stage. Cant remember...

[11-90-an]

I would like to see a phylogenetic tree. I bet the people on this forum could create that if we manage to come up with an efficient way of doing it collaboratively.

This is a fascinating idea - a evolutionary tree of stompbox distortion designs, starting with early boosters and fuzzes, and then developing them into more complex circuits, adding bits, taking bits away, etc etc. Meanwhile, other trees sprout from some new root somewhere nearby.

I think the start of the tree would either be
1. synths
or
2. old tube amps turned to volume level 11
or
3. somebody tossing a speaker down the stairs and discovering that they like the broken cone sound

[Mark Hammer]

Afaik, the voltage feedback bias circuit aka fuzz face, simply existed as mic or phono input stage. Cant remember...

I often see subcircuits in solid-state amplifiers and "hi-fi"  unts that jump out at me as Fuzz-Face look-alikes.

[pinkjimiphoton]

I would like to see a phylogenetic tree. I bet the people on this forum could create that if we manage to come up with an efficient way of doing it collaboratively.

This is a fascinating idea - a evolutionary tree of stompbox distortion designs, starting with early boosters and fuzzes, and then developing them into more complex circuits, adding bits, taking bits away, etc etc. Meanwhile, other trees sprout from some new root somewhere nearby.

I think the start of the tree would either be
1. synths
or
2. old tube amps turned to volume level 11
or
3. somebody tossing a speaker down the stairs and discovering that they like the broken cone sound

started with the telharmonium in new york. google it up. that was what led to quite literally everything else... with the hammond organism being the impetus of pretty much everything to come. but the telharmonium is kinda where all things music started from an electrical viewpoint.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telharmonium

[pinkjimiphoton]

definitely. properly...ummm.. mis-biased, a fuzz face makes a nice preamp stage, i forget what they called it, schmitt trigger or something



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schmitt_trigger

obviously different from a FF, but... kinda similar. of course, remember, i'm a monkey with opposable thumbs n a breadboard

and i still don't think EVERY distortion possibility has been found. give one of the disturbed minds here some time, something new will come up. shoot, who did a bias clipper before i lummoxed across it?
who used a transistor actively in a feedback loop as a clipper before my dumb ass decided to try it? both cases are "different" ways to make distortion. there's a LOT more than those two examples. are they great? not particularly, but they ARE different and unusual and hadn't been done before.... so never give up, never surrender.

there's stuff out there to find. free your mind....

<3

[Steben]

Afaik, the voltage feedback bias circuit aka fuzz face, simply existed as mic or phono input stage. Cant remember...

I often see subcircuits in solid-state amplifiers and "hi-fi"  unts that jump out at me as Fuzz-Face look-alikes.

[amptramp]

I am still dreaming up new distortions because some of the existing ones don't give me the control of parameters that I want.  Testing is proceeding slowly and erratically on one design that I predict would be the ideal distortion simulator because it allows you to set parameters with reckless abandon, unlike fuzzes with fixed diode voltages and resistances.  We haven't even scratched the surface of distortion / fuzz technology.  Onward!

[vigilante397]

I gave up with distortions because I was having a hrd time selling them. You know what has been selling for me? Tube preamps. It can be a distortion if you want a distortion, it can be a clean boost if you want a clean boost, or it can be a unity level tone shaper.

That being said everything I sell is more or less a complete ripoff of Fender, Marshall, Soldano, Mesa, Hiwatt, Sunn, Ampeg, Orange, etc. with a copy/paste power supply in front of it

And as a side note I'm currently tweaking my Tubescreamer variant, but it has a tube in it Yeah, I have a niche.

[LightSoundGeometry]

I gave up with distortions because I was having a hrd time selling them. You know what has been selling for me? Tube preamps. It can be a distortion if you want a distortion, it can be a clean boost if you want a clean boost, or it can be a unity level tone shaper.

That being said everything I sell is more or less a complete ripoff of Fender, Marshall, Soldano, Mesa, Hiwatt, Sunn, Ampeg, Orange, etc. with a copy/paste power supply in front of it

And as a side note I'm currently tweaking my Tubescreamer variant, but it has a tube in it Yeah, I have a niche.

I made a bunch of these using those 6111 triodes
https://tubedepot.com/products/6111?gclid=Cj0KCQjwnqH7BRDdARIsACTSAdvtnVcvCk0i9QuKOIE4vSmAn5Tn4swQwojSnlergu9iqHcNUVfYXM0aAqx8EALw_wcB