Can someone look this over for me?

Started by psiico, April 22, 2006, 06:53:45 AM

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psiico

Anything wrong with this?  This is the result of a week on a breadboard playing with the Ruby design, I call mine the Emerald in keeping with the original gem names.  Everything sounds okay but I want to make sure I'm not breaking any major rules or anything being such a newb and all.

It starts with a Fetzer valve (runoffgroove.com) with a switch to choose between high input and low input.  The circuit runs on 12v but I biased the drain of the FET to 4.5v with the 100k trim pot.  I left out the 22nf cap, I figured the caps in the tone stack were enough.  Was this a mistake?  Tone stack is from Duncan's Tone Stack Calculator, it's a slightly modified Fender stack.  Next is a switch for bypassing the distortion.  Why add a distortion instead of using the gain from the bridged 386's?  I liked the sound of this one better, it's the Big Daddy circuit from runoffgroove.  This'll go from old school overdrive to high gain Metallica thick crunch  depending on tone and volume settings.  I changed the 15k resistor from 9v to the drain of the FET to a 33k since with 9v and 15k I was getting about 6.5v, 33k and 12v was giving me about the same.  I have a 250k pot on my schem but it's a trim pot set so that with gain up all the way it's the same volume with the bypass on or off.  I would have used a 100k pot but for one thing this thing will have enough knobs for a mini amp and for another I don't have enough 100k pots, lol.  Next comes the buffer stage from the Little Gem mkII.  I don't know if I needed this but it sounds better with it then without so it got left in.  Last is the Ruby part although I guess it's more Little Gem mkII then Ruby.  The only chnage there is the 2.7k resistors between pins 1 and 8.  Trial and error led to those values, it just sounded good to me.

As is with everything turned up it's just about to turn into a noise machine.  It's right on the verge of distorting out of control and squealing like a pig.  I won't normally have it that loud anyway and that requires the treble, mid and bass to be cranked too.  With normal settings I can get quite a range of tones by changing the two volumes and the gain, the tone stack just adds to it.  There'll be a power switch and indicator LED as well.  Power is supplied by a 13v 300mA adaptor I had kicking around from an old phone charger.  The voltage is regulated down to 12v with a regulator I got from an old TV.  This one won't have batteries, I'll be putting batteries in my next one which will be 18v since I have a couple of 386N-4's.

So before I start soldering, have I broken any rules?

psiico