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AMP OVERLOADER PEDAL

Started by overloader, January 17, 2006, 08:52:17 AM

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nelson

#40
January 18, 2006, 05:04:19 AM
Quote from: Mark Hammer on January 17, 2006, 07:43:40 PM
A couple of things...


Now, having said that, go to General Guitar Gadgets, and look through the late Charles R. Fischer's experimental; distortion design that was published post-humously in Electronic Musician: http://www.generalguitargadgets.com/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=174&Itemid=200

Yes, it is a distortion, and I know you didn't want a distortion, but this one utilizes a design in which the distortion element can be  "current starved", and apparently is capable of yielding some of those Neil Young type amplifier splat tones.  Note that the 4049 used as the distortion element is often used to deliver more tubey tones.  I'm not saying it nails tube amp tone, just that it is not intended to be a metal fuzz.  If this is in the direction of what you seek, go for it, and folks will be happy to help you troubleshoot what you build or have built for you.  If not, then I guess keep searching.

And guys (the rest of you), time to lay off Walters.  He has some things to learn about writing tight concise posts, but he's a decent guy, and doesn't deserve eternal razzing.


Damn, I was working on a design to starve a CD4049UBE.

Alot simpler than that circuit though.
My project site
Winner of Mar 2009 FX-X

davebungo

#42
January 18, 2006, 07:50:58 AM
Searching for the sound

slacker

#43
January 18, 2006, 08:11:22 AM
Probably completely off the mark, and it looks like overloader has burnt his boats here anyway, but what about compressors in series maybe with a bit of boost or overdrive. You can get some pretty messed up but relatively clean sounds with over compression.

David

#44
January 18, 2006, 09:03:52 AM
Ummm...  this might do the trick.  I haven't tried it yet.

Overloader, my guess is that you're going to have to explore the "Herzog" angle.  A simple way to get there MIGHT be to try this:  Get yourself a Presonus BlueTube and the CORRECT power supply.  Get or build a distortion, booster or compressor.  Feed your instrument into the pedal and the pedal into the BlueTube.  Use the pedal and the DRIVE control on the BlueTube to get the "meltdown" sound you're looking for.  Set the gain for the desired output level.  Send the BlueTube's output to the device of your choice.

Like I said, I haven't tried this yet with my BlueTube.  However, I know I'm on the right track because I patched it in between my bass and an amp.  Using the DRIVE control carefully got me a pretty faithful copy of the bass sound on "Tom Sawyer" with nary a pedal in sight.

Mark Hammer

#45
January 18, 2006, 09:08:50 AM
Quote from: slacker on January 18, 2006, 08:11:22 AM
Probably completely off the mark, and it looks like overloader has burnt his boats here anyway, but what about compressors in series maybe with a bit of boost or overdrive. You can get some pretty messed up but relatively clean sounds with over compression.

I'll augment that and suggest that the compressors can't be "good" ones.  Again, I think the image and analogy that Overloader suggested at first was something where the sound was unstable in a variety of ways.  Having envelope ripple from one compressor produce additional envelope ripple in a second might come close to that sort of semi-clean instability, but to do that you need to have two compressors with second-rate sidechains so that the first one HAS ripple and the second one doesn't cope with it well.  If the first one has flawlessly smooth tracking of the amplitude envelope, there's no error rubbed in the face of the second one.

PenPen

#46
January 18, 2006, 10:47:01 AM

Not that it matters much at this point, and really I can't figure out just what the hell he is looking for, but tooting my own horn for a sec I just finished a design to get the 'torn speaker' sound with the Pungent Bzzz. If you tack that on with something to give the starved tube sound, maybe that will do it. I just keep hearing references to 'overloaded speaker' and 'torn speaker', that is exactly what my first design posted here was. It sounds pretty nice through a gained-up tube amp, not splattery like the GarageFuzz.

Though I still have no idea how a overloaded tube amp can be clean.

Mark Hammer

#47
January 18, 2006, 11:05:54 AM
SeanM came over to my place once and brought his Torn's Peaker to audition.  It wasn't really my taste.  What I thought was funny, though, was that my admiration for guitarist David Torn was strong enough that the association I made with the name made me assume it was some sort of Torn-inspired resonant booster.  Emulating a "torn speaker" (well, DUH! :icon_rolleyes: ) was absolutely the LAST thing I was imagining before I heard it! :icon_lol:

PenPen

#48
January 18, 2006, 11:09:49 AM

Do you have a schem for this Torn's Peaker? This is the first I've ever heard of it, and searching isn't turning up anything. Is this a DIY design or a commercial pedal?

Damn, I didn't think there was anything else out there that did the torn speaker thing, I couldn't find anything in my searches...

tiges_ tendres

#49
January 18, 2006, 11:54:44 AM
Quote from: PenPen on January 18, 2006, 11:09:49 AM

Do you have a schem for this Torn's Peaker? This is the first I've ever heard of it, and searching isn't turning up anything. Is this a DIY design or a commercial pedal?

Damn, I didn't think there was anything else out there that did the torn speaker thing, I couldn't find anything in my searches...

torns peaker is made by effektor 13.  I may have mis-spelled their mis-spelling! :)
Try a little tenderness.

freak scene

#50
January 18, 2006, 01:51:43 PM
http://www.garnetamps.com/herzog.htm

like was mentioned earlier, its basically a champ with a dummy load tapped.

its the sound you hear on the "american woman" solo.

Gar is the man.

overloader

#51
January 18, 2006, 04:17:41 PM
I'm back! Well, thanks to all the serious advice and the jokes. The jokes and frustrated comments make it a fun read. I'm going to explain this pedal once again, with as many details and in many different ways so that we can all understand what I'm looking for in this OVERLOADER pedal for me...OVERLOADER.

THE CLOSEST I CAME TO THE SOUND: Plugging a les paul w/emg's (60s) into a Way Huge swollen pickle fuzz (sustain on "0", tone with some lows/highs, volume 5), into a Pete Cornish SS-2 overdrive pedal (sustain on "0", tone adjusted to so there's some highs, volume 5 - not too high so I don't blow amp), then into a Silvertone 1451 w/8" rola alnico speaker.

The only problem is this amp is low audio quality, it's not like the quality of a Fender Deluxe brown! It's like listening to a $5,000 sound system playing NIN, or a small Sanyo portable boombox playing NIN (nine inch nails). Sure, the guitar is distorted and the audio is all twisted, but I would like the audio quality and headroom to be good. So would you, right? In previous post I was generalizing when I said small amps are poor quality, most are! My Fender Twin had much better sound quality than my Fender Champ. Probably because of the size of the speaker (bigger speaker with cleaner and bigger lows) and the huge transformer on the Twin.

The sound I want has very little distortion and fuzz. It's more of a speaker breakup, tube overload, sucking the power out of the amp. My Silvertone was close to this OVERLOADER sound I'm seeking when it had the original 6 inch speaker, but the quality had too much grit to it and not enough headroom to be used as a main guitar in my recordings.

When a guitar amp has the life sucked out of it, the sound tends to do the following:

1. The highs disapear from time to time depending on how hard you hit the strings.

2. The distortion/fuzz disapears slightly because the speaker can no longer handle producing the distortion/fuzz (of course there would still be some dist/fuzz and that's fine).

3. From time to time the sound would totally disapear and there would be moments of silence. I friggin love when that happens, that is the part I love most, because it sounds like the amp is about to shut down. It also gives the impression that the guitarist playing is just totallly out of control...as I am!

HERE IS THE ROUGH DESIGN IDEA FROM "JUJU KRACKER" PEDAL DESIGNER

Input volume-gt;
input tone controls-gt;
silicon preamp on/off +
gain-gt;
JFET preamp on/off + gain (very very high) + low pass
filter-gt;
germanium preamp on/off +
gain-gt;more tone
controls-gt;
a couple of different fuzz/distortion configurations which are all switchable like the preamp sections like an overloading poweramp, crossover distortion where you can control the crossover, half/full wave rectification, matched germanium transistors, nbsp;
etc, and even all could be on at the same time or not-gt;
different switchable diode clipping-gt;
more tone controls-gt;
blendable force feedback loop-gt;
master volume, and maybe a compressor and gate in there somewhere, there is this really good distortion that can come out of overdriving this high end compression chip that I have a few of.
I feel like with these options you would be able to dial in any of these sounds that you are looking for, like overloading some of these circuits would produce drop outs, stuttering, synth NIN noise, low
frequencies, razor blade buzz saw sounds etc and also alow you to create lots of never before heard sounds which work based from the quirks of running some of these kinds of circuits into one another but
also give you the rudimentary elements to create just about any fuzz/distortion/overdrive/and beyond sound out there. You would have lo-fi, high-fi, and everything in between.

###

So what do all you proficient pedal makers think of Ju Ju Kracker's design? Do you think it will produce the sound I'm looking for?


Mark Hammer

#52
January 18, 2006, 04:31:50 PM
Once again, I'll say that you are basically describing something where, if the circuit could talk, it would say "I'm TRYING, man!  I'm trying!" (or you can stick in Scotty saying "Ah'm dewin' what ah cahn, Cap'n, but ah don think she can tehk anymore").  That is several cascaded devices which, place demands on the power supply of subsequent devices that can't be met.  When I mentioned plugged boosters into fuzzes, it's because I have often been able to get the audio equivalent of a caterpillar or worm recoiling when you touch it by using one high gain device to feed another with the sort of transient that sent the second device into conniptions.

In general, what you are describing is not the sound of something clipping by imposing a ceiling on signal level, but the sound of something that simply can't deliver any more current yet keeps trying.  Sometimes that can be what some folks aim for with "dying battery" tone.  That's what may well be interesting about the circuit I referred you too earlier.  It doesn't starve the entire circuit, just part of it.  And if you think about it, that's part of what happens when a guitar player is wailing away into an amp thatis justabout to give up: the signal source is at full strength and shows no sign of giving up, but the thing that has to DO something with the signal can't take it anymore and is overextended.

perhaps what you really want to do is run some experiments with variable power supplies and devices that either boost but don't clip at all (e.g., compressors), or that clip gently or are capable of mild clipping.  Who knows, maybe feeding a hefty slightly overdriven signal to Dynacomp with a steady 6.8v current-limited supply will do what you want.

A.S.P.

#53
January 18, 2006, 04:41:03 PM
grid-blocking...
Analogue Signal Processing

Mark Hammer

#54
January 18, 2006, 04:54:52 PM

RDV

#55
January 18, 2006, 05:07:45 PM Last Edit: January 18, 2006, 05:16:45 PM by RDV
Try a Bennett Music Labs 'Insane Gain'.

It's 3 cascaded LPB-1 style boosters. It will cut out and overload, without that much distortion, but then so will a Z.Vex 'Super-Duper 2n1'.

My idea of this tone is Hendrix's performance of 'Wild Thing' at Monterey 67'.

rdv

A.S.P.

#56
January 18, 2006, 05:09:26 PM Last Edit: January 19, 2006, 12:00:18 PM by A.S.P.
can`t think of the proper name rightnow - the effect is similar to what happens in the silicon world, when the signal sticks at the rails for a moment, until the device recovers...

kind of amp-hikkup

a saturation thing...

[sorry - I was/am so occupied/taken by reading 7 pages of the "through zero doppler" thread over @ HC... now I`m all messed up with expressions]  :icon_eek:

Analogue Signal Processing

A.S.P.

#57
January 18, 2006, 05:24:46 PM
this is new: BOX of ROCK (TM)
Analogue Signal Processing

PenPen

#58
January 18, 2006, 05:27:27 PM
Quote from: A.S.P. on January 18, 2006, 05:09:26 PM
can`t think of the proper name rightnow - the effect is similar to what happens in the silicon world, when the signal sticks at the rails for a moment, until the device recovers...

kind of amp-hikkup

a saturation thing...

[sorry - I was/am so occupied/taken by reading 7 pages of the "through zero doppler" thread over @ HC... now I`m all messed up with expressions]  :icon_eek:

Reading the HC forums can have an adverse effect on one's ability to speak intelligently, so I understand. ;) I lurk over there too, when I post I have a completely different persona just because some of those people can be so damn hard headed and ignorant. Over here I can be more reserved and I'm by far the student here, so I can act appropriately. Trying to explain some of the most basic things at HC can get frustrating when you have some other dumbass arguing against what you say, because he heard it from some buddy of his and its completely wrong.

Sorry for the OT rant....

A.S.P.

#59
January 19, 2006, 12:17:04 PM
well, the name "overloader" seems to be taken...
how about:
the "Melting Tubes",
"Glowing Tubes".
"Purple Tubes",
"Liquid Bottles",
"Melting Glass",
"Tube Meltor",
the "RedHot X-former",
"Wailon Transformer",
"Crying Coils",
the "Goodbye EL34",
"Goodbye 2 Toobz",
"Marsholl`s Lament",
the "P.A.-Shutdown",
the "Fuse-Exterminator",
"TUBE-ZERO"
:icon_biggrin:
"PoorTooB"
Analogue Signal Processing
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