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*It's designed to fit in a 1590B with top mount jacks.

Autocorrect did me dirty.

Lol that file name. So 1590F is it? 

Jokes aside, nice work!

I'll print something kinder on the actual PCB 😘. The board is designed to fit in a 1590A with too mount jacks (of your into that).

Our repartee got me thinking about the SHO and the Speaker Cranker and how much I enjoy the sound and simplicity of operation. This circuit sandwiches the SHO between a pre-emphasis and de-emphasis stage to create an overdrive while retaining clarity. Gain staging and filter cut-offs can be set internally, then it's all rock and roll!

I couldn't bring myself to do SMD, but I was inspired to make a one knob, mosfet overdive!

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I noticed that you changed Q2 from Ge to Si, did you try both?

I didn't test a Germanium transistor; I generally avoid them as they are both more expensive and less reliable than silicon. The mosfet boost at the front softens things in a similar fashion anyway.

But I'll use all SMD inside. 😈

One of these days I'm gonna put a moseft boost in a 1590XX just to spite you! 

[Lows]

This is my highly tweakable take on the Harmonic Percolator. I've added a modified Push-Me-Pull-You in series for octave fuzz goodness.



Water slide decal on bare aluminum for the graphics. I wanted the metallic look of a Moka Pot.



I used my standard I/O and bypass layout.



A mosfet boost feeds the fuzz section to allow for more saturation. This is especially important as I decided to leave out clipping diodes. They just seemed to mask the character of the fuzz. The Lows control is pre-fuzz. From fully clockwise to noon, it tightens up the fuzz response. Below noon it noticeably attenuates low-end content. The Gain control is just a volume control for the boost output, which feeds the Harmonic Percolator section. I arrived at the values here after much experimentation, trying to get as much tonal variation as possible. The Highs control uses negative feedback to attenuate treble in the Q2 gain stage. Placing it here effectively cuts high-end content without masking the character of the fuzz. Clang sets the bias of Q3 (which in turn effects the bias of Q2). This goes from smooth saturation when counterclockwise (think Albini values), up through the spitty ripping-velcro type sounds the percolator is known for, and into farty misbiased octave down sounds as you move clockwise. Lastly, Octave blends in a separate octave up circuit, which is based on Tim Escobedo's Push Me Pull You, and is optimized to compliment the fuzz. As this sub-circuit comes after the boost and percolator sections, it is sensitive to the other controls.

I'm pleased wth this design. It gets all the sounds I'd want from a Harmonic Percolator while remaining farily ugly proof (for a fuzz).

Here's a demo:

As always, I have extra PCBs. If anyone is interested in building one, DM me.

Revive the soapbox!
I'm sick and tired of those brainless websites that flood the Internet with ChatGPT-generated content.
"Are you looking for the guitar related tone source? Let's talk about the potentiometer shaft!"
Idiotic phrasing like that gives these sites away, in addition to thier 34 IQ information and stupid web address names. This garbage should be cleaned up / banned / relegated somehow. The real question is:  what possible purpose or advantage does somebody recieve from making these sites? It just clogs up being able to find the 5% of actual relative sites.

The site is just a substrate for ads. Google can serve you ads when you search and the site can serve you ads when you visit their page. It's only worth it as long as LLMs are cheap to use. The "growth at all costs" phase of AI is due to end in the next couple of years. Either a winner (monopoly) will arise and they can start squeezing customers, or the venture capital will dry up and company valuations will drop accordingly. If we're lucky, they won't cause a market crash...or maybe the market is already crashing and it's being masked by all the imaginary money tech companies are throwing around at AI.

Awesome. Gotta like a pedal with a Throb toggle!

There's your band name, Throb Toggle.


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Sounds more like the fine print on a little blue pill. "If your throb toggle stays in the 'on' position for more than four hours, please contact your doctor."

[edit: spelling]

[Throb]

The Weeble is my take on Tim Escobedo's Wobbletron, a true phase vibrato. Phase vibrato has a depth and dimensionality that I don't hear in delay based vibratos. Because the amount of pitch bending is frequency dependent, where you play on the neck, pickup selection, and tone controls can all effect the depth and quality of the vibrato.



I used "sea breeze" for the enclosure color and a Japanese wave theme for the pattern.



I used through-hole JFETs because I had them, but the PCB will accommodate surface mount as well.



I've added a second phase stage which allows for extra depth as well as more vibrato at slower speeds. The LFO is left unchanged other than allowing half the minimum speed of the Wobbletron because it's already giving about as much as it can. The capacitors in the all-pass stages really do make a difference in the tone of the effect. With Throb and Chop off, you get a magnatone kind of sound simillar Tim's design, but with much more depth available and the option for going half as fast. Throb changes the knee frequency of the first all-pass filter. When engaged, it can get a little into Univibe territory. Chop changes the knee frequency of the second all-pass filter. This is more dramatic a change than the Throb control and almost sounds like tremolo at faster settings. The first half of the Depth control provides a smooth warble. Beyond that, it starts to get choppy at most speeds.

Despite being close to unity gain, this is not a high-headroom effect. Sending the signal through two JFETs limits the dynamic range. For most guitar signals, this shouldn't be an issue, but this won't handle a proper line level output. That said, when it does saturate, it's pleasing; it sounds like a cat purring. Overall, I'm pleased with the range of wobbly sounds this circuit makes.

Here's a demo:

As always, if anyone would like to build this, I have extra PCBs. Just DM me.

[Noise]

Cool! I actually took that topology from the PT2399 datasheet. The first adjustable version a ever saw was the Noise control of the Hamlet delay.

A buffer is usually the most elegant solution to impedance mismatches, but it's not the only one. You can just passively split a signal, but it tends to cause problems. In the case of a ToneBender that wants to see the pickups, the extra loading might actually be a good thing. You may find that you have to tweak values in the input stage of the ToneBender to get it sounding right with the SHO in parallel.

You could also try using a simple BJT boost with low fixed gain, (maybe 6dB?) followed by series resistance. This would isolate the pickup so that it would see a consistent input impedance. The series resistor will bring the gain back down to unity and also raise the impedance that the TB is seeing back to passive pickup levels (if you get the values dialed in right).

You could also get even more fancy and use an inductor-based pickup simulator.

Looks great! What kind of filter topology did you end up using?

This video came out a while ago about poisoning AI crawling YouTube with fake (invisible) subtitles. Maybe something similar could be done with HTML comments?

Wow! It looks like it actually compresses!