Saturator/sound crusher for drum machine?

[egasimus]

Just bought an Alesis HR16, and love it. It's used by one of my favourite bands, and it's also capable of some great industrial sounds with some extreme distortion, pitch-shifting, and reverb - all from my Zoom G1 multi-fx. However, I'm afraid that, if playing live, I'm gonna need the Zoom box for my guitar.

So that makes me want to build a sound crusher (not necessarily suitable for guitar, low-ish input impedance for work with line signals would be ok), consisting of (at least):
* a high-gain saturation/distortion stage (CMOS inverters? JFETs?)
* a resonant low pass filter (not necessarily voltage-controlled).
Also, I'm thinking of a Schmitt trigger + octave divider to produce square waves in different octaves for some background drones. And maybe something freaky with a PT2399?

What do you think? I'm gonna play around with this on the breadboard a lot, but I need something to start with.

[Strategy]

Have you thought about a tube device? I built the Frequencycentral 'Promiscuous Girlfriend' tube overdrive and use it on drum machine a ton.
Strategy

[wavley]

I run mine through an Effector 13 Truly Beautiful Disaster, you can get some nice octave jumping, if you add something else to the feedback loop it gets really nice.

Devi was nice enough to post the schem for the fuzz

http://www.deviever.com/fx/forum/viewtopic.php?f=192&t=12527

I also run mine through a Roland SVC-350 Vocoder, that's actually one of my favorite things to do depending on what you use as a carrier.  Paia has a project for a vocoder and I think the EHX Iron Lung is affordable if I remember correctly.

[sault]

Well, in the spirit of keeping it simple, I was going to suggest a hacked tape recorder for saturation and an Atari Punk Console for the background stuff. For saturation, I also thought about a distortion pedal (Big Muff, DS-1, Dr Boogie, etc) into something like a Condor cab simulator.

I'm curious how an Orange Squeezer would handle drums...

[Strategy]

I use Orange Squeezer on drum machine but more as a utility to warm the sound and control dynamics, and not as much as a crushing effect. Optical compressor circuit might be more extreme - I use an older model Joemeek compressor to do this. Still, it's not very distorted.

I have used Lovetone Big Cheese and Brown Source DIY builds for good drum machine distortion as well

Strategy

Well, in the spirit of keeping it simple, I was going to suggest a hacked tape recorder for saturation and an Atari Punk Console for the background stuff. For saturation, I also thought about a distortion pedal (Big Muff, DS-1, Dr Boogie, etc) into something like a Condor cab simulator.

I'm curious how an Orange Squeezer would handle drums...

[egasimus]

Well, in the spirit of keeping it simple, I was going to suggest a hacked tape recorder for saturation and an Atari Punk Console for the background stuff.

Now we're talking business.
I read a while ago about a this commercial 'tape sound' simulator which actually used tape recording & playback heads against each other. Might be a cool build I'd really have little use for one, as I use FerricTDS on my records, and there isn't much point in using one live, at least where we're playing.
Also, probably some CMOS logic-based MIDI sync to an Atari Punk Console would be cool. Damn, I have a knack for wanting to do stuff with logic even though it's probably gonna cost me more than just putting an 8-pin ATtiny in there.
The Orange Squeezer is an interesting idea, it's on my build list, gotta try that.