Orange Vintage Reissue Distortion Sch. & Mods

[Mae Electric]

Hey everyone!

First time poster here, just wanted to share my findings from tracing the new Orange Amps Vintage Reissue Distortion pedal.

Right off the bat, the actual distortion circuit here is very similar to ye olde Wampler Plexi Drive, but with a few tweaks. The tonestack circuit here is lifted from a Marshall amp (weird, considering this is an Orange Amps design) & there's a pretty neat buffered bypass switching system going on. Interesting to note that on the unit I traced, C13 was omitted - a capacitor in this space would form a low pass filter before the tonestack, to tame high frequencies from the clipping amplifier.

TR1 takes the place of the treble control in the tonestack, & is serviceable to the user. This is set at the factory to '3', or about 30% of the way up. I find this is most useful for tailoring the sound of the unit to your amp (I play a pretty dark amp, so I nudged the trimmer on mine up to '5').

A further thing to note is C15. The stock value for this cap. is 47pF, but this seems off to me... a Marshall tonestack uses 470pF, & the difference between those two values is very noticeable to the ear:

Orange Vintage Reissue Distortion Frequency Response.png (12.67 KiB) Viewed 505 times

The orange plot shows the freq. response of the pedal as it comes from the factory with the stock 47pF cap., whereas the blue plot shows the freq. response with a 470pF cap. - I've personally modded my unit with a 470pF cap. & it absolutely rips \m/

I'm currently working on a true bypass version of this topology & also changing the tonestack out for a more traditional 'Orange' TMB circuit.