DS-1
A transistor boost into hard clipping, bright and unsubtle.
Hard clipping to ground
Diodes after the gain stage shunt anything above their threshold straight to ground, so the waveform is sheared off flat with a corner on it. Same idea as soft clipping, applied in a different place, and the corner is the audible difference.
- In
- Out
Drawn to illustrate the description above, not measured from a specific unit.
What the circuit does
A transistor gain stage feeds an op-amp stage, and the result is clipped hard to ground by diodes. The tone control is a single sweep between a dark low-pass and a bright high-pass rather than a stack, which is why the two ends sound so different from each other.
What to listen for
A brighter and more brittle edge than most drives, with a scooped quality in the middle of the tone sweep. It sounds thin on its own into a clean amp and comes alive in front of one that is already breaking up.
Where it goes
The overdrive and distortion slot
After the fuzz and before everything time based. Distorting a signal and then delaying it keeps the repeats clean; delaying a signal and then distorting it drives the repeats and the dry note together into one smear.
Controls
- Tone
- Level
- Dist