Distortion Plus (with CJ's Plus-Dist board!)

[Bret608]

Hi everyone,

Well, it is the middle of a fairly hard winter here in Wisconsin, which means even my garage is too cold for any kind of painting/clearcoating. So when choosing circuits to box, I have to go with ones I have no specific graphics planned for, at least until March or April.

Turns out this was a fun choice to box! I was pretty over-reliant on my old Dunlop reissue Distortion plus from about 1996-2004, mainly due to being obsessed with Bob Mould's guitar sound. From about 2000-2004, I was in grad school and wasn't paying attention to what gear was coming out. Long story short, when I found out about all the boutique stuff going on, I sold most of my old pedals to try out all the great new gear coming out.

So this was like rediscovering an old friend, only now I have a better idea what I want sound-wise. I liked what Paul (Chromesphere) was doing on his videos with trying out different diodes in this circuit. The combination of something germanium and a 1n4148 especially appealed to me. I tried a 1n270 with a 1n4148 initially, but in person it sounded almost too assymetrical to my ears. So I followed Jon's (midwayfair's) advice about trying to find a good 2 to 1 ratio with the forward voltage.

So, believe it or not, what you see in the picture are all 1n270s, both the clear glass single and the blue (!) ones in series. This let me get a forward voltage of .23 mA for the single and .46 mA for the series pair. It's louder, but still has the germanium character. Here goes; forgive my ineptitude with our new camera:



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By the way, despite this being my simplest build to date besides a buffer, I made some nice PCB and boxing mistakes. I was proud of my debugging though!

[spaceboss]

Nice!

I've got one of those boards hanging around in the 'need to build' pile.

Debugging is roller-coaster from the most painful to the most enjoyable/worthwhile parts of DIY

[Bret608]

Thanks man! It's such a pure 'n' simple kind of build, you'll enjoy it.

One thing I forgot to mention...for anyone who hasn't tried one of the black Alpha 3PDTs that PPP and SB now carry, try them out! This was my first and I like the action and feel quite a bit.

One quick question too for anyone else who reads this. I'll ask here as it's no huge deal, so a Tech Help thread might be overkill.

One time I switched the pedal on without the power supply plugged in. I then plugged it in, and it took like a full five or six seconds for any sound to appear. It's like the power supply cap needed to power up or something. Is this normal?