something newish from something old, and a question...

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pinkjimiphoton
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Post by pinkjimiphoton »

a bud was talking about a fuzz he had a dream about, and i was bored so i decided to draw something up.

many years ago i stole adapted culture jam's dead easy dirt 386 distortion into what i called the "stiff hippy"... i was f'in around with it on my bench for shits n grins, and as a candidate for an overdrive pedal for MLA, and said... hmmm...

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 ball head scratching involved, as to do the switching between the clippers, WITH a pot in the middle was significantly above my 10,000 monkeys paygrade ( lieber mein abschnicke!!)
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 fucked up and it is, but its like that for a reason. its a damn 386, no where to put any other kind of tone control. this is for all intents like using the guitar tone pot to shave off some high end, and worked great. so i left it, as per the original design, tho i bumped the cap up to 27n from the original 3.3n that barely was noticeable on the original one.

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 dumb crazy inclined enough to include that.

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:


Image

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!
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Post by Manfred »

Hello broth,
nice to read again about a new stuff from you, the description of your new creation sounds good and promising.

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pinkjimiphoton
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Post by pinkjimiphoton »

hey brother manfred!! great to hear from you!
if ya breadboard it, i think ya may diggit. hope you and yours are well and safe in these crazy times!
"When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace."
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pinkjimiphoton
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Post by pinkjimiphoton »

PURPLE GREEN_STIFF HIPPY V4.1.png
here's a shitty quick vero i knocked up. as it turns out, you don't need a 4p3t rotary, a 3p3t is all ya need
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Post by Manfred »

Manfred wrote: 14 Mar 2021, 18:28 Hello broth,
nice to read again about a new stuff from you, the description of your new creation sounds good and promising.
Thanks Jimi, we are are healthy.
We live in a hick town like on an island with a low rate of infection, sometimes we necessarily swim out carefully.
I hope you are well too?

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Post by The G »

Max out the Blend pot at one clipper side, then switch between the Blend pot and the clipper alone. Are the sounds different enough to warrant switching? Maybe you don't need a switch. Kinda like this:
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pink_stiff_hippy_v4_alt.png
pink_stiff_hippy_v4_alt.png (4.88 KiB) Viewed 2687 times

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Post by stolen »

We suspect The G might have a point there - if you do however hear a difference, you could use an On-Z-On switch which would enable you to use the blend even when the sides are turned off to gradually decrease influence of only one diode pair, like this:
http://stolencircuits.net/fsb/hippy_switch.jpg

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Post by pinkjimiphoton »

hi guys,
oh, you can definitely hear the difference when panning between the two kinds of clippers. the original used 914's and 4001's, the 914s clip faster and a bit harder than the 4001's did.
its like the way i did it because the guy who asked me about it asked for it to be that way specifically.... left si, right ge, and in the middle a blend between the two.
he wants hard clipping on either side of the switch, and then to blend/pan between the two types. the way i show it initially, its hard clipped to either side with no influence from the resistance of the pot which he felt was important; in the middle, yes, you do get the resistance added in as well which will soften it any way you look at it slightly.

since its been years since i built the original transmission overdrive
(here ya go)
TRANSMISSIONOVERDRIVE15SCHEM_zps781daa07.png


i suspect i may need to play with the blend pot value and make it a bit smaller, maybe 1k instead.

hey stolen, by on/z/on, you mean one of them on/on/on switches where it switches poles in the middle position? if so,
that would be a more elegant solution i think than a big ass rotary, but only if it isolates the pot completely on the outside poles.
i never really fucked with those kind so thanks for the suggestion.
hippy switch on z on.png
hippy switch on z on.png (152.84 KiB) Viewed 2659 times

and, just to be complete, the original stiff hippy pedal:
StiffHippyIIOverdriverSchematic.png


wow... fire up the wayback machine... this hippy is getting old...lol
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Post by stolen »

pinkjimiphoton wrote: 15 Mar 2021, 17:09 hey stolen, by on/z/on, you mean one of them on/on/on switches where it switches poles in the middle position? if so,
that would be a more elegant solution i think than a big ass rotary, but only if it isolates the pot completely on the outside poles.
i never really fucked with those kind so thanks for the suggestion.
Hi Jimi!

An On-Z-On is something like a DPDT switch, but with a middle position! The outer positions are just like with a DPDT, but in the middle it's criss cross, with one pole connected to one outer position and the other to the other, if that makes sense. It's kind of the opposite of an On/Off/On, and actually some call it an On/On/On DPDT. As a result you can't swap the poles either, it's best to measure them with a multimeter or so before wiring them up if you don't have a datasheet.

In the outside position, our idea however does NOT switch off the pot completely, but you can get that setting by just rotating the pot to the respective side and it still shorts perfectly to one diode pair with the other one being isolated. However, the pot is still usable in the outside position, so you can select one diode pair and just blend it in a little bit. Not sure if your bud would be into that, but it doesn't restrict sound options, it just gives you more settings to play with :D.

For your original approach we unfortunately see no way to go smaller than 3PDT either...

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Post by CheapPedalCollector »

The germanium diodes might not be able to handle the current of the LM386, should have a current limiting resistor of say 1k at least before them.

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Post by pinkjimiphoton »

thanks for the explanation, stolen... yeah, i have some of those switches, i use 'em for series/split/parallel with humbuckers sometimes.
but i talked to the guy just now, he was adamant, he wants the hard clippers iso'd on the outside.... but i DID tell him to order a couple 1k pots for the panning too, in case 10k is too much like i think it will be.

hi cheap, the ge diodes are fine with the output of the 386, even full blast. i've built a bunch of them over the years without the blend control. 1 k would soften the clipping up quite a bit. maybe more like 100r or so, but even that will effect it a little from my experience. the ge's breakdown voltage adds up with them in series, so 3 of 'em ends up being .6-,9 v which should be fine for this kinda purpose. i suppose <tho never tried it> if it were a concern, you could use biggish resistors in parallel with each diode <like in the filter cap supplys of some guitar amps> but so far, doesn't seem to be necessary.

if i had any fuckin' brains at all, i'd (or i will) just go and take the pedal currently built without it and add the adjustable clipper to it, but i'm pretty fuckin lazy... cris's pedal will be a bit different from what i currently am using in it.... mine is more of an overdriver than a fuzz. with the bigger caps its more of a fuzz... that was how i had built this last one, but after revisiting it it just had too much dirt for my taste so i limited the fuck out of the possible bass response which made a huge difference.
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Post by The G »

Sorry, should've been clearer. I was not talking about the difference when panning, but the difference between
1. the switch in, let's say, the Ge clippers position
2. the switch in the blend position and the blend pot panned all the way to Ge clippers and

Like this:
difference.png
difference.png (2.56 KiB) Viewed 2568 times

Usually, blend pots make switching redundant. But didn't test it, just felt like that would not be a significant difference. Based on clipping voltages, the difference would probably be easiest to sense in the situation above.

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pinkjimiphoton
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Post by pinkjimiphoton »

yeah, but you aren't understanding. this is what the guy wants. like i said. 3 way switch. left si, middle both with blend pot, right, ge.
so its ultimately irrelevant. it doesn't matter if its redundant, what matters is the guy paying me is happy lol.
i understand how this works, and all.
peace
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Post by The G »

Yeah, I didn't understand that the customer wants the switch. In that case, you need 3 switch positions and 3 connections (the blend pot pins). I don't see how it can be done with less than a 3P3T, unless you separate and buffer the clippers.
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pink_stiff_hippy_v4_3p3t.png
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pinkjimiphoton
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Post by pinkjimiphoton »

which is exactly what i did. rotary switch. easy breezy done. thanks for the graphic tho, i didn't know exactly how to draw it, and the vero layout in diylc doesn't offer a rotary switch... at least not in the old version i use. but in your drawing, it shows it as ge si then blend. he wants blend in the middle, which is how i have it setup on the vero. yours is similar, but not quite right to what the guy wants.
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Post by Manfred »

To see the frequency response as a function of the filter potentiometer, I ran a simulation of the circuit between the input and the positive input of the LM386,
taking into account the input resistance value of the LM386 with 50 kilohms.
stiff-hippy input filter.jpg

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Post by pinkjimiphoton »

thanks manfred,
but i don't know what any of that stuff means, lol
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Post by Manfred »

pinkjimiphoton wrote: 19 Mar 2021, 15:47 thanks manfred,
but i don't know what any of that stuff means, lol
I forgot to mention that the frequency response curves for the resistance values of R_philter are 500 Ohm, 1k, 2k, ...10K are shown.
The simulation shows that the high-cut frequency increases with increasing resistor value.
I think for you anyway nothing surprising, since it is what you wanted.

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Post by pinkjimiphoton »

ahh, gotcha... thanks bro
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Post by roseblood11 »

Can't S3 be omitted?

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