Bluesbreaker pedal

[Roobin]

Okay, so I built one of these as my first project. I like it, although it wasnt what i expected. Does anyone know of any cool mods? I tried Frank Clarke's page, but it no longer exists. I'm thinkning of reducing the immense amount of treble - increase input cap? Also there is a lot of noise, which im trying to eradicate, but to no avail. btw its on perfboard - is PCB less noisy? Or is that a common misconception? 

Ah the inexperience of the newbie.

[swal]

i don't know about mods but i first built my on pref and it made alot of noise. then i built it on a board and it is very quite (for a distortion pedal).

[WGTP]

Try a .001uF to .01uF cap to ground at the end of the circuit to cut the highs.

IIRC it used 4 diodes, try using 3 or 2 or 2 LED's or any combination.

IIRC there is a 6.8K resistor connected to the diodes.  Try by-passing it, or using 10K or 22K.

Increasing the input cap may increase bass, but may also make it less smooth sounding.  Be warned, once you start...   

[Burton]

What a coincidence, I was just thinking about building a Blues Breaker.  Where'd you get your layout/schem?

[Roobin]

There are two places to get the project - Tonepad (i didn't use this one) and General Guitar Gadgets. I used GGG. It could also be eslewhere, but nothing beats these two for project files - layout, schem, bill of materials - everything. Marvelous.

However, I should point out that there are a few mistakes in the GGG files - please IM me to find out.

BTW, others who have built this, did you find that it had an a LOT of treble, or was it noisy? Is there a low noise replacement for the TL072 chip?

[Arn C.]

TL072 is a quieter IC, also so is the NE5532

Email me for a modified blues breaker schematic, I saved from this site a while back...
arn.conklin@ametek.com

Peace!
Arn C.

[Roobin]

Email me for a modified blues breaker schematic, I saved from this site a while back...

What corrections are they?

I meant earlier that the bill of materials was missing a cap somewhere, and that the jacks just need labels. Apart from that, congrats goes to JD SLeep who i think made a set of files like this for nearly every effect. 

BTW does anyone know where i could find the BBII schematic. Thought it might be interesting to compare the two.

[Brett Sinclair]

I made one with an OPA2134 and switchable between shottkey diodes and si+ge diodes. With the shottkeys it's a lot louder and 'crunchier' with the si+ge fuzzier. Didn't notice anything noisy about it though...

[Arn C.]

Here ya go Roobin......

[WGTP]

This is where my dual op amp experimentation started several years ago and it continues...

The resistor cap network to ground from the first op amp is sort of unique and there is room for modification there, as well as, the others I mentioned above.

A .001uF or so cap in parallel with the 6.8K/diodes combo will reduce the treble some.   

[PaulC]

A couple of things to try - change the 50pf cap on the 1st stage to something that will really start rolling out the highs when cranked.  500p to 1n is a good start.  You'll still have all the highs when using lower settings, but you'll have a smoother overdriven sound because there's not as much high content being clipped by the second stage.  Also try playing around with adding clippers to the first stage.  I like a slight asym clipping here that happens after the 2nd stage has already started it's sym clipping. 

Later, PaulC