Almost all my 4049 based stompboxes sounds horrible...

[spud]

Hey - this is the thread I've been looking for!  Since you all have experience with the various 4049 circuits, which is best sounding in your opinions - seems like the new Microtube is a front runner but there aren't any clips.  My question is this:  considering that some of the clips from the various products do sound pretty good and there remains a lot of debate/discussion about the sound of these circuits, are the clips representative of the respective circuits or are they just flukes that cannot be duplicated?  I'm not looking to stir up controversy I'm just trying to avoid building (breadboarding at this point, really) them when they can be excluded.  I'd really like to know what is worth building and what not worth it. 

spud

[gez]

When designing a circuit it inevitably gets tweaked to suit the designer's setup: guitar, PUs, amp etc.  Hardly surprising that some people don't get on with circuits, then, if they've been tailor made for someone else's rig.  That's not to say that a circuit will sound bad if built by anyone else, just that it might sound a little different from the clips if you don't happen to have a Strat and Marshall...or whatever.

The important thing to remember, though, is that nothing is cast in stone.  If something isn't quite right, it can usually be remedied pretty easily with a few tweaks.  Best to think of circuits as a starting point.

[remmelt]

I've only built a couple of Red LLamas, but I can vouch for their tonal quality. I've built 4 so far, and they all sound alike if not the same. The only thing I've changed is the resistor in the voltage supply, making the value higher didn't affect tone and helped with battery life.
The ICs were all CD types but from different manufacturers. To me, they all sounded pretty much the same. This is definitely one of my favourite home made effects. Very smooth with my Strat + Ruby or 5F1 Champ replica. Sounds really bad on a Novanex 15W SS amp though. Horrible metallic rasping, no smoothness at all. YMMV, and as noted above, the effects should match your other gear and playing style, not the other way around!

[WGTP]

gez, thanks for the output Z info.   

[phazon]

Remmelt;  I understand that you last replied to this thread in 2008, but I have not found anything else that is as close to my experience on this.  I just built a RED LLAMA (craig anderton T.S.F.).  I did a breadboard version of it first.  The finished product and the breadboard versions sound identical.  Both have a mushy, bogged down distortion that sounds worse as the gain is turned up.  Not at all the smoothness I was expecting or not like the sound clips I have heard on youtube.  I did notice that there is s conflict with twhat is shown on the schematics and what is shown on the PCB layouts. The 61pF cap shown between term 5 and 4 on the schematics (in and out of first opamp, whichever one is being used) is shown as being in series with the 100k riesistor coming off the gain pot on the PCB layouts....  Does this effect the sound?  Should I be doing it like the PCB?  Thanks 

[anotherjim]

At the start, it's mentioned how good Mark Hammers Forty-Niner is. Why?

These things are supposed to soft clip in a tube-like manner. They do. But...
Unlike anything else, the inverters constantly reduce gain as signal amplitude increases. Almost everything else we can amplify with, including tubes, is linear (same gain) up to some limiting level.

My own tests have shown only x6 gain at the point that hard clipping is noticeable, no matter how high the feedback network may be setting gain. However, for small or zero signal, the gain is a lot more than x6, maybe it's x30 to x40.

When a musical signal comes along, at it's zero crossings it is boosted by maximum gain while at the peaks it is squashed due to much reduced gain. The squashed peaks tends to damp out the harmonics while at the zero crossing, they are boosted.
I think this "burst" of  harmonics is the reason for this unmusical harshness. It's easy to remove that harshness by filters but risks dulling the whole thing down. Up at 1M or more feedback, even a 47pF cap is quite heavy filtering.

I find with the Red Llama as it is, I like the basic sound well enough, but the player has to keep pushing it. Great for Punk thrashing but not so nice for the Blues.

Going back to the Forty-Niner, it doesn't rely on the inverters for high gain, so there isn't these unbalanced bursts of harmonics at the zero crossings. Instead it pre-boosts and eq's the signal by more conventional means. The inverter then works its magical soft clipping on the peaks without an unbalanced boost of harmonics through the zero-crossing.

[blackieNYC]

I wanted a buffered version for another project - they're hard to find. So if you bought the chip, and didn't just find it in a drawer or a piece of equipment, you've got the right chip. 99.3% sure.

I love the forty niner - I've built them (completely stock values I believe)with and without the anderton booster (which is much like a fixed wha wha pedal sound). Very distorted, but smooth, metal-worthy.
Stick with it, or order a new chip. And clear the breadboard and build something else while you wait for it to arrive.

[Mark Hammer]

Don't forget Stellan Lehrberg's "Slowfinger", which takes my approach even further.  (Whatever happened to Stellan?)