An idea

[mnordbye]

I just came up with an interesting idea.. I'm thinking of a new kind of clipper switching, were a pot changes between to sets. An example; At one extreme of the pot, 2 leds clip the signal, and on the other extreme of the pot, 2 1n914s.. And when rotating the pot, you kind of blend the two extremes.

Have anyone tried something like this? I can see it would be cool to get this theory working physically.

Magnus N

[the_random_hero]

Swap the pot for a rotary switch and you're describing a project that I and a few other guys from another website had in development.

[Ucho]

Something like AMZ Warp Control maybe? 

Look at Jack's Lab Notebook, there's a lot of great info/ideas!

[mnordbye]

Ahh, that's about what i was thinking about, yes.

I maybe thought about implementing a dual gang pot, and wire to sets of resistors on each side of the pot. Set 1 on upper left lugs and set 2 on lower right lugs.. More from one set, less from the other.. I might take this in a design in this months contest. 

Magnus N

[alex frias]

What about a a RAT/TS combo with a parallel mix to blend both distortion engines?

[mnordbye]

That's another good idea..

[Mark Hammer]

Like this one?  http://hammer.ampage.org/files/Roseyray.gif

[alex frias]

Beautiful structure, but I was thinking about using those circuits not in cascade but side by side each one with its own level mix pot.
If somebody already built some sort of "pedal paralelizer" project and pursue those two pedals, handmades or not, could even test and report the result for us.

[mnordbye]

Very interesting stuff, anyway.. 

Magnus N

[Mark Hammer]

The thing with "blended distortions" is that both circuits will generate harmonics.  Where they should be different is likely in the proportions of each of the harmonics contributed and the likelihood of generating clipping.  If circuit A is doing something only marginally different than circuit B in either of those two respects, blending them won't do very much of interest, and you'll spend most of your time with one or the other up full, but little time with blends.  So, what you want is something where fairly high contrast distortions are combined.  I tried to do that with the Roseyray by having a double-clipped mid-scooped high-gain distortion combinable with a warmer Dist+ type clipper.  It wasn't perfect, but the germ of the idea is there, and virtually every position on the Tone pot yields something audibly different, which is essentially the goal.

Another sort of overlooked aspect is the relative sustain of each channel.  I'm a big fan of the Gretsch Controfuzz, which takes advantage of the manner in which a superdistorted fuzz "outlasts" the natural decay of a clean signal, and appears to "fade in" a fuzz over time as the clean signal fades out.  Yet another reason to want to use high-contrast distortion circuits as your elements to be combined.

Consequently, my own recommendation would be to have two cascaded distortion circuits.  Since the second has its own tone predicated on the "character" of the first (i.e., they both see very different input signals), they will be different in terms of their harmonic distribution and clipping character, as well as the relative duration of sizzle.  The pan-pot arrangement I used gave me some problems, so use of a separate output level pot for each channel, going into a passive or active mixer circuit might be preferable.  The key thing is to try and make them different enough from each other so that small adjustments in level of each makes an audible difference.