Guitar Overdrive circuits


Posted on Oct 15, 2012

Although labelled as distortion, this is a soft clipping device, using germanium diodes. It's a good example of how little you need for a good basic sound. You could easily swap (or switch) these diodes to silicon types for hard clipping. Not necessarily the next pedal chronologically, but look at how similar this design is. It uses 2 silicon diodes for symmetrical hard clipping. I would also expect that at high gain settings, the IC also clips to the supply rails. No discussion on overdrive pedals is complete without looking at the Ibanez Tube Screamer. There have been several minor variations of the pedal released by Ibanez, and a larger number of variations sold by boutique pedal manufacturers.


Guitar Overdrive circuits
Click here to download the full size of the above Circuit.
Guitar Overdrive circuits - image 1
Click here to download the full size of the above Image.
Guitar Overdrive circuits - image 2
Click here to download the full size of the above Image.

Nevertheless, the green Ibanez box is a very smooth sounding pedal that retains the guitar timbre well, and for that reason works well with single coil guitars. There is not an enormous amount of drive available, and the tone control is subtle. Like many overdrive pedals, there is some middle boost, caused by the bass cut before overdrive, and treble cut afterwards. Another common use for these pedals is as a middle booster to drive a valve amplifier harder. This is done by setting little or no drive, but with the level set high. In the schematic, you can see two silicon diodes, back to back, in the negative feedback path of an op-amp. This arrangement gives symmetrical soft-clipping. These were originally sold without the tone control. The design is nearly identical to the Ibanez Tube Screamer with 2 important changes. More boost is available, but is partly offset by using 2 diodes in one direction and only one in the other. This produces asymmetrical soft clipping, meaning that one side of the waveform is clipped more severely than the other. A more common implementation of asymmetrical clipping is to use 2 silicon diodes, with a germanium diode in series with one of them. There is lively debate on the Internet about whether this sounds more natural, and whether it better emulates some asymmetric valve phase splitter designs. In any case, I think it does add a little character, and therefore suits humbucker...




Leave Comment

characters left:

Related Circuits

  • New Circuits

    .

     


    Popular Circuits

    Light Sensor Switch
    voltage frequency synthesizer PLL
    Timer with alarm
    Rf Signal Generator Circuit
    DIY Digital Thermometer
    ac I need help matching parts
    tube head amplifier
    LED ramping circuit
    Basics and implementation of capacitive proximity sensing
    Battery SaverCircuit
    Cheap I2C bus control stereo decoder TDA9853H



    Top