many years ago i
cris wanted fuzz, gain, filter and a switch to choose si, both with a blend pot, or ge clipping. since the stiff hippy had a "philter" on it already, i was like... wellp... lets do a little cookbookin'.
so cuz he wanted to be able to "blend" between two kinds of hard clippers, i remembered my "transmission overdrive" from days of yore, and decided to incorporate it into the circuit, changing from the fixed asym ge/si clipping in the stiff hippy. easy breezy. lotta
at first i thought i could do it with just a toggle switch and a pot. yeah, right.
so i called up my brother wes from the band, an EE to see what he suggested. he could not understand what the hell i was trying to do, of course, but suggested doing it with a chip of some sort, and came up with a design using two dpdt's. i looked at it and said... nope. nah gah happah.
it was a real ball breaker. i mean, for such a simple thing, that's a LOT of connections that need to be swapped around. drew up a bunch of unfunctional but amusingly close circuits, but NO-O, CAN'T BE THAT EASY, PINK!!
FINALLY in a fit of temporary lucidity amidst the hot-smokin' sassafrass poluting the dungeon and my mind, i saw the light... one rotary switch, 4p3t which is fairly easy to find, and it could work... tho it seems kinda overkill to do it.
anyways, all that led to this thing below.
the philter looks
i changed the input cap from 220n to 10n, and the output cap from 4.7u to 33n. made a WORLD of difference tonally, and took it from a fuzz bomb to a nice marshally overdrive kinda sound. cris wants fuzz, so his will have the original values which are way more of a fuzz bomb than what i currently consider useful. so you can make it either way, or add a second footswitch to choose between overdrive or fuzz bomb if ya want to. i didn't include that possibility, but its fairly easy to implement if someone was
the switching lets ya choose hard clipping with si/schotkee/led/mosfet whatever, or asym germanium <takes rougly 6 ge diodes to equal a pair of si diodes, here we use 5> or, in the middle, a pan pot from my venerable transmission overdrive to pan between the two different clippers. easy breezy.
standard 100k output pot. i used a 386 n on it, but a 386 is a 386 for this purpose.
and anyways, this is what i ended up with:
it sounds great, feels good.... nice little overdriver with a fairly decent response, for a 386 dirt box. there's not a whole lot ya can really do with these... lol
anyways.. my billion dollar question... is there an easier/more eloquent/more elegant way to implement the clipper switching? this seemed the easiest way to me to do it, but i am SURE i'm not doing it the best way...
has to be just one switch, so the rotary seemed the only way to fly. i was kinda thinking maybe a hex inverter as a switch? i dunno. remember, i am an blithering stimpy-esque idiot.
if ya breadboard it, let me know. its been a while since i posted anything "new"...figured wtf!