Tools, Tones and Toys for Guitarists
Yet to build this myself, I quite like the idea behind this – I am partial to anything with bass / mid/high controls for guitar and a germanium transistor. Bonus points for also including a discrete op-amp, which I’ve been playing with lately. Before I looked at the schematic for this, I was playing around with modding a Boss Blues … Read more
A classic Boss overdrive – the one that started it all for Boss guitar effects, originally sold from 1977 to 1985. This is one of the later designs that does not use the quad opamp. Kind of curious that after this, many designs used the Boss version of a discrete opamp that can be seen in several … Read more
The Gretsch Controfuzz is yet another variation on the Distortion + the key point of difference this time is the clean blend, which makes this a little different than the rest. This layout does include a mod that increases the 10k distortion control to 100k, as 10k seems to be too small to be workable with … Read more
I thought I might finish off layouts for the rest of the Dan Armstrong series, as I’ve already done a few. Anyways, while I was looking at schematics of the Blue Clipper from all the usual sources online, I noticed that the opamp bias looked a bit odd. Then I noticed a few layouts used … Read more
A classic – the Dan Armstrong Orange Squeezer. It’s a very simple feedback-based compressor using JFETS as variable resistors, driven by a single diode acting as a half-wave rectifier. This makes it pretty snappy to play, unlike an optical compressor which is traditionally a bit slower and smoother – not that there’s anything wrong … Read more
A nice booster from Thorpy, most likely Dan Coggins design. The build notes from PedalPCB suggest germanium diodes across the opamp for a dirty boost. Schematic can be found here THORPY HEAVY WATER BOOSTER – VERO LAYOUT This puts out a lot of level, and the low cut can put it in treble boost territory on … Read more
I saw this Gray Bench teardown video the other night, and the values looked a little different to what I’d seen on other Sun Face schematics, so here it is. If you don’t feel like watching the video, the key difference: 51k resistor on the collector of Q1. The rest is all pretty standard for … Read more
A nice simple one – the DOD 250, which is a Distortion + variant. Or is it the other way around? Either way, it’s a classic. DOD 250 OVERDRIVE PREAMP – VERO LAYOUT DOD 250 OVERDRIVE PREAMP – SCHEMATIC DOD 250 OVERDRIVE PREAMP – VIDEO DEMO
I’d already done the Blues Breaker in this format, and it sounded pretty good, so I thought why not try the MI Audio Crunch Box, as it’s a high-gain derivative of the Blues Breaker. They have a similar topology – the Crunch Box has the soft clipping diodes removed and hard clipping LEDs added after the … Read more
I’ve had some success with the Joe Davisson diode compression discrete opamp on some other circuits (namely the Cornish SS-2), so I thought I might try a Blues Breaker – it works… sounds good. Apart from the lack of IC, there are a couple of other minor mods to a stock Blues Breaker, mainly a larger input … Read more