Here’s a project that I built up some years ago. This never found it’s way into a box. I dug it out and decided to try and box it up. Difficult with the number of switches and knobs. I think I have a viable plan to shoehorn it into a BB sized. box.

This is a pretty interesting distortion box. It’s sort of a Tube Screamer, Rat, Distortion +, with an Octave up. When I finish it up it should be all of those things in one box.

This was built using the layout generously provided by R.G. Keen of GEOFEX fame.

Here’s an idea for a ring modulator. I used a 3080 for the balanced modulator from the Ring-Modu-Matic. I used an envelope, from the Meatball,  to control the carrier frequency.

This is untested. The controlling the FET to turn on the carrier is going to be a challenge.

This is a first draft of an idea that I have been thinking about for a few months. It’s a Tremolo that pans between the input signal and the signal coming through the FX Loop. If no signal is coming in to the FX Loop it would act as a normal Tremolo. Otherwise it would be cycling from the straight to the effected signal.

The main idea was taking from Nicolas Boscorelli’s Stompboxology Tremolo-Matic X. I make no gaurantees that this actually works as I haven’t built it. This is just a first pass to get the idea down.

This is Tremolo-Matic X from the Tremolo Issue of Stompboxology by Nicolas Boscorelli. I have redrawn the schematic to make it easier to read. Hopefully this will be helpful to anyone attempting this project. This is Tremolo that pans between a treble and bass signal. It inlcudes controls to set the level for both the bass and treble, rate and depth.

I built mine from the PCB layout posted by Morocotopo at Diystompboxes here. This lay out worked well for me. Though it looks likes it isn’t finished as there are a few extra pads that don’t quite make sense. The layout does work. I have built it myself.

It sounds pretty good. I made a few changes. First I changed the Rate pot to 100K to get a more useable range of speeds. With the original 25K pot the slowest speed was not very slow. I like the sound of slow tremolo. The 100K pot is shown on my vsersion of the schematic. speaking of the rate, I’d like to get a slightly faster rate at the fast speed and a little slower at the slow end. I think I will be playing with R21, R25 and C15 a little more.

The other mod, not included in my schematic, is to decrease the gain on the input stage. Basically this comes down to decreasing the value of R14. With the original value of 470K you get a little bit of clipping with hot pickups. I haven’t decided on a value yet.

Note the, input stage is inverting. Which presents a lower input impedance than would normally be acceptable. But it seems to work OK here.

Also note that there are a few parts list as optional feed through bias or something like that. These parts include a 5V regulator and adjacent parts. I left these out of my build, and everything worked fine. I left these out of the schematic posted here.

Built Jack Orman’s Son of Screamer last night. Fired up the first time and sounds pretty good. I have not owned a Tube Screamer before. After building this I’m understanding the complaints about the “mid hump” in the sound. The sound is very focused in the mid range.

There seem to be many mods for this floating about. So I thought I’d build a second one to compare to the first. I picked out the LovePedal Eternity. There is a good thread about this one here.

From the schematic it looks like the Son of Screamer with a few changes in parts values. From what I can see it seems the Eternity just increases the lows as described in this article Muzique.com.

Of course the next step is make the RunOffGroove Tube Reamer for a final comparison. Looks like the Tube Reamer adds event more.

It looks C2 is increased from .047 to .1, from SOS to Eternity, and doubled again to .22 in the Tube Reamer.

This is Jack Orman‘s Minibooster.

This is Tim Escobedo‘s FET Driver.