What are your Favourite ways to Distort?

[The Tone God]

Talk about WMDs. :lol:

Andrew

[Eric H]

There are some great ideas in this thread. Anyone serious about designing their own circuits should go back and re-read the posts from Peter Snowberg, and Paul C  --there's gold in those two.
-Eric

http://users.abac.com/ehensel/stompbox/

[Jered]

I haven't heard a pedal sound more like a cranked tube amp than the Meteor. The harmonics jump out of this pedal, seriously. I've been using it for months and every time I hit that switch I can't help but get an ear to ear grin. Its a thing of beauty. Thanks again Doug.
 Jered

[Alpha579]

Sorry, ur right, didnt get it....I might have a go at one of them for emulating a Vox AC30 or Fender DR....

[WGTP]

So, it looks like we need 3 to 5 stages of distortion, with gain, EQ and symmetry adjustments for each.  

[Alpha579]

Lol, It takes so long to get to what is 'the perfect stompbox' eh?

[PaulC]

I'll be honest - I spend way more time with tube circuits than fets.  I don't know  all the tricks for fet circuits - I just try to get them to look like the tube versions on the scope.

I've spent some time with a real Express, and have played around with the design, and trying to get the fets to look sort of like it.  If you wanted to get the "shapes" right you'd have a sym clipping distorting first like the pwr tubes would.  A minibooster JFet would be cool for this, or a diode pair to ground at the end.  After that distorts a medium amount you'd have the "inverter" stage kick in in front of it.  This is a pretty good hard clip with a medium amount(?) of  asym clipping going on.  That's driven by the 3rd stage that kicks in with a massive amount of asym clipping.  The top portion of the wave is chopped off big time.  This works to help square up the inverter at hi gain levels.  You'd want to bias this fet so you have very little upward swing to clamp it, and a large clean swing on the bottom to clip what would be the inverter stage.

What I wished I could figure out is how to actually split the thing in two and clip it like a real inverter/PP output section , and then recombine them like a transformer would and squish it up a little.  Then I'd follow that by a Bax tone circuit to fine tune it to the amp.