Kraken Clipping

[mschuerm]

Built a Kraken using Madbean PCB and parts from Tayda---got the CA3080 from SmallBear, though.  Everything seems to be working fine on the pedal, except when I pick or strum hard, I get clipping---is this normal? Nothing major, but the clipping sounds pretty nasty on the clean channel of my solid-state practice amp. Thought maybe it was related to guitar output, so I tried both a Gibson with P90s and a Fender with single coils. Any advice on this isssue?---many thanks!

- Matt

[natelerner]

I'm having the same issue. Did you ever get it worked out?

[madbean]

Is it clipping at all Range settings or just when you have the Range control set high?

[A Dirty Hobbit]

I've been having the same issue. Comes on across all the Range control. Any heavy picking starts loud clipping.

[madbean]

It's probably to some degree the nature of the effect itself (The Kraken is a 1:1 clone except for the added attack and decay controls). The MicroV has a really low input impedance by today's standards due to the 100k biasing resistor on Q1. That was something I tried to address in the 2020 version with the T1 trimpot (which is a 500k trimmer in series with the biasing resistor). So, my suggestion would be
-if you have the 2020 version turn that trimpot up to maximum to see if helps.
-if you have the older version, try increasing R2 to 470k or 1M similarly.

The increased resistance will change the tone a little, but not in a bad way. Just slightly different.

[A Dirty Hobbit]

Sweet! Thanks for the quick reply. I'll give it a shot tomorrow and see how it goes. All in all the sound is great out of this build!

[A Dirty Hobbit]

For anyone else with a similar issue. Backing off the volume knob works wonders. I ended up swapping out R2 for 1M as suggested above. Here's a reference.

[natelerner]

Great suggestions, thank you! I'm using this with a bass and found that with specific pickup volume settings and the range cranked all the way up, clipping is gone. Overall, the tone on this thing is great and I'm super happy with this, my 1st pedal build.