That *Lemony Fresh* New Pedal Feeling, Now With SoundClips! Hurrah! Boo!

[phaeton]

Night before last I soldered up a new distortion circuit of my own design (if you can call anything really *your own design* these days).  I even found a few breadboard-->schematic-->perfboard mistranslations and fixed them, thanks to a prev. thread about biasing, and the geofex debug page.  I'm all proud of myself and stuff for figuring that out.  I haven't boxed it up yet because I spent all night playing through it, much to the disdain of the dog.

The circuit actually sounds better than I expected it to. I originally thought up the circuit to be something like a Fuzz Face in concept, however (to my ears) it doesn't really sound like a FF.  I was expecting to give it a "? Face" name to go along with tradition (fuzzface, squareface, fetface, etc) but now I've got to come up with something else.  Suggestions welcome
It's got more of an early-mid 1980s LA hard rock/pre-metal sound to it in its primary mode.  I'm trying not to get a huge head about it but if i could go back to that era people would be just as all over this thing as they were with DS-1s, Dist+ and Rats.  It can do a few other things too- like a soupy compressed oversaturation sort of sound and a really raw, filthy kind of rattle that would fall right into some oldschool bluesrock with no trouble, possibly saving a few speaker cones from rusty kitchen knives.

Oh, and it's quiet.  No noise. None. Even though the circuit was just splayed all over the floor with no enclosure.

Anyways,  I'm not trying to hype it or pump it up, and I know that there are a thousand pedals better than it is.  I have to redraw the schematic before I'd post it anyways (to fix a few things) and I don't expect anyone to go gah-gah over it like I am, but I'm all wound up on neophyte pride and had to share.

Oar something.

(thx)

P.S., I'm already considering a couple of modifications.  Is this a disease now?


(Edited title)

[David]

Man, you're gonna hate me for this, but I just can't help it...  How about the "BIG HARE"?

I mean, a hare is a rodent -- just like a rat.

I know, I know, I'll get me coat...

[wampcat1]

You've been bitten by the bug that ails us all!!! Now you will suffer the consequences and start trying to get by on 2, 3 hours of sleep a night! 

Congrats, I'm sure you'll tweak it even more and it'll evolve into another pedal, which will evolve into another pedal and so on. 

[puretube]

Is this a disease now?

...can easily become epidemic  

[David]

Pandemic, baby, pandemic!

[Paul Marossy]

Resistance is futile...

[phaeton]

I meant to name the topic "That *lemony* fresh new pedal feeling"... oh well...

Man, you're gonna hate me for this, but I just can't help it...  How about the "BIG HARE"?

.

Actually, that's pretty cool.  "Big Hare".  I like that. Filthy rabbitses! et al... (for the record i think rabbits are cool pets).

You've been bitten by the bug that ails us all!!! Now you will suffer the consequences and start trying to get by on 2, 3 hours of sleep a night! 

Congrats, I'm sure you'll tweak it even more and it'll evolve into another pedal, which will evolve into another pedal and so on. 

Exactly.... Once again the "what makes it a modification of an existing pedal, what makes it a new pedal".  There's not really a line drawn between them, it's just a foggy haze about six feet wide.  I like the pedal as-is aplenty, but I've got a set of mods I want to breadboard and see what they do.  These mods are simple but they may turn it into a completely different animal.  Maybe I'll have to distinguish them using "Little Hare" and "Big Hare".

1)  For instance, throughout the circuit the signal passes through four 0.1uF caps in various places.  I know that bigger caps equal more bass response, but I'm not sure if 0.1uF is a size that will already pass all the bass a guitar can offer or not.  If not, this brings up other questions, like letting in all the bass (so it can affect the rest of the spectrum while distorting) but then cutting it on the way out, or cutting bass on the way in and letting it all ('false' bass response generated by the circuit instead of the guitar) out in the end.  Will i get more thumpy palm muting action, or will it simply mush up the nice, focused bottom end it has at the moment?

2) The drive control is a 100K pot (lug 1 input, lug 2 (wiper) output, lug 3 ground).  I had an epiphany (not an epiphone) that I could increase the drive in the top end by making the pot 500K or 1M.  It'll go from Alice Cooper/Judas Priest/Iron Maiden distortion sounds to str8-up over the edge Slayer/Megadeth/Metallica etc.  However, it'll make the drive control pretty 'touchy', and on the bottom end of the scale it may not clean up like it does now.  There goes the aforementioned filthy Neil Young sound and possibly the nice 'caged and focused' feel it has now.  It's pretty versatile for such a small, simple circuit so I'd hate to see it turn into a one-trick pony.

Oh well... it's never done I guess.. heh...

[The Tone God]

Is this a disease now?

No but you are screwed now.

Andrew

[phaeton]

Is this a disease now?

No but you are screwed now.

Andrew

Well, i guess if you're going to get a disease, you might as well get screwed too, eh?


Btw, are the 0.1uF caps on input, output and throughput big enough to let all the guitar bass through, or should I double those?

[Peter Snow]

I mean, a hare is a rodent -- just like a rat.

I apologise in advance for what I am about to say

Rabbits and hares are not rodents.  They are in category of their own called Lagomorphs. They are characterized as "plant-eating mammals having fully furred feet and two pairs of upper incisors and belonging to the order Lagomorpha".  (Mmmmm.... sounds a bit like a girl I used to date )

OK, it's been a slow boring day...

Peter

[phaeton]

Alrighty...

First off, we need to give thanks to David for giving this circuit a name.      Second off, thanks to this forum and to articles such as those you find on Geofex.  You know, "standing on the shoulders of giants" and all.  Yes I know what it looks like.  You can only build gain stages so many ways, and I can assure you that I arrived here methodically instead of by cut-n-paste.  It would have been easier that way, but I wouldn't want to trade the knowledge I've gained by doing it 'the hard way'.  Also, this is my first time messing with a CAD program in about 15 years, so there might be some errors on this.  I couldn't find any phono jacks.

Nonetheless, I had a lot of fun piecing this together, debugging it, researching this problem and that problem, solving this and that step by step, and in the end, I've got a circuit that's more than just a novelty.  I like it more than any other distortion pedal I currently own, commercial or otherwise.  What an exhilarating experience!  I've already got a stupid amount of modifications swimming in my head.    MAKE IT STOP!!! MAKE IT STOP!!! 

[phaeton]

Some soundclips:

One
and
Two

First one is the 'basic' tone- Gain at 100%, volume at about 50%.

Second one is "All Knobs Full Up" and the output squasher engaged.

Both recorded through a Reverend Goblin on 5W setting, eq flat (50% on everything), using a sh*tty $12 microphone I bought at Target 100 years ago (my condensor mic is unexpectedly broken).  Five Cyber bux to the first person that can tell me what song "One" belongs to.

Note that this is played with no warmups and no feeling in either hand so my apologies for clunkers and sloppiness, esp. on the pseudo-wank that is Two.

Strangely, the oscillation problem I had earlier has returned, but not as bad.  I recall this circuit sounding a little better a few days ago, but maybe i'm misremembering.

Thanks.

[Connoisseur of Distortion]

holy crap. hold the pedal to your ear and you can hear the 80s!

it sounds good. really does. Nice work on that!

[radio]

What do you mean ,it sounded better some days ago

you used only 2 transistors.  Oh well,being jealous again!

I hope to have during next week to build my copy of it.Thanks for sharing your design!

Greetings JME

[ragtime8922]

Does your squasher circuit work like that? It appears to be shorted and in need of 2 poles (DPDT).

Anaway, welcome to the disease! Can't wait to go check out your clips right now!!!

[Sam]

Does your squasher circuit work like that? It appears to be shorted and in need of 2 poles (DPDT).

Eh, what?

[Sam]

Hurrah! Even though hair metal is false metal, ergo bad metal. 

[RDV]

Cascaded gain stages are a good thing. Just ask Randall Smith(I did). When I was 15 I asked him to build me an amp. He said sure can you wait 6 months and proceeded to tell me who all was in line in front of me(a who's who of classic rock) so I says no thanks and bought a piece of crap Hiwatt(late 70's) that blew up 5 minutes after I finally got it.

Yes I'm old.

RDV

[phaeton]

What do you mean ,it sounded better some days ago

you used only 2 transistors.  Oh well,being jealous again!

I hope to have during next week to build my copy of it.Thanks for sharing your design!

Greetings JME

Didja have a chance to try this out?  Just curious how it went for you.  And WTH are you jealous about?

You might want to breadboard it first though.  I went back and breadboarded a copy of this and did an A/B with the finished pedal and there definately is a difference.  The breadboarded one has a tighter, more gainy sound, but the pedal is a little more jagged and slightly mushy, and it does whistle still when I turn the knobs up.  The mushiness sounds esp. good with my strat but I can't figure out what I messed up on the boxed version.  It all looks right, i've shortened all the wiring, gone over it a zillion times with magifying glasses and in various lighting conditions.. The breadboarded version has even longer leads all over the place and I moved them all around each other and I can't get it to act up there.  It's a bit of a headscratcher. The oscillation/gating happens in the second stage, of course.

Maybe the 2N5089 is to 'hot' for this type of circuit?  I'll have to try building another (permanent) one with a better layout on the board.  I might even pick up some PCB-fixin's from Radio Shack for $750 and try my hand at that....

[NoFi]

Big hair, for that eighties metal sound...