NOC3 Firefly OD

[micromegas]

This has been on my board for a while, but I was to lazy to do a build report.

Now the time has arrived:









I've been using this overdrive instead of my beloved Zendrive since February, and it is going to stay arround for a while...

The pcb is from an original NOC3 Firefly. I bought it from Nick Colquitt when the pedal got out of production.


Description:

Based on a well-known dual op-amp topology (ala Clay Jones, Son of Screamer, Zendrive, etc) without buffers

It has two different clipping configurations:
- soft clipping happening in the first stage with mosfets (like the Zendrive)
- hard clipping (with mosfets too) between the first stage and the tone circuit.This has been already discussed in this forum before and RobA has an overdrive that takes advantage of something similar (that is on my bench right now).

Tone circuit is similar to a BMP but has a switch that commutes between 3 caps that change the mid freq character.

The trimmers are, from left to righ, a saturation control for the clipping happening in the first stage and a highpass filter after that first stage (this works great in conjuction with the tone control).


Here you got the schematic.



This is an interesting od, full of ideas we already knew (a lot of them seems to be taken from Jack Orman's articles) but well executed in the end.

The result is a bluesy overdrive that can also get some mid scooped distortion sounds.

Note: the led matches the wiring color...

[Leevibe]

Al, that's a handsome pedal inside and out!

[lincolnic]

That looks really great. Hard to beat a good hammertone finish.

[Blues Healer]

I have two or three original Fireflies around here ... they're GREAT overdrives!

[Mich P]

Classy, i like hammertone.
Mich P.

[micromegas]

Thank you guys, the hammertone enclosure helps a lot, and Josh's Optotron makes the internal wiring something easy and clean.

I have two or three original Fireflies around here ... they're GREAT overdrives!

They are great indeed. You can get great bright cleans out of them, then crunchy tones (this works awesome with neck and middle pickups on my strat) and make it scream with a humbucker for lead tones.

[nzCdog]

Very tidy!