Ideas for getting the resonant frequency back

[midwayfair]

I was thinking about "transparent overdrives" and one of the issues they all have is that the 4-5KHz resonant frequency of the guitar's pickups is just gone afterward. I wonder what might happen if you clipped the signal heavily, then attenuated it and used the remaining headroom not to boost the signal but to create a big peak frequency near where a typical pickup is.

Would it sound good? Or would it sound like crap?

Food for thought.

[blearyeyes]

Seems like a contradiction in terms. Transparent or flat gain takes out a frequency bump at 4-5k?
How does that work? Seems like a transparent gain device would just pass all of the frequency content?

[RobA]

So, I have to expose my total ignorance here first. I really have no idea what's the difference between a distortion and an overdrive or about half the time between a distortion and a fuzz. Although, I guess that I can always tell the difference between a fuzz and an overdrive, so that's something. On top of that, I don't have the slightest clue what "transparent" means. So since you mention clipping, I'm going to go with that. I think that since heavy clipping adds upper harmonic content, you have to be careful about too much of a peak at higher frequencies. But, in playing with the distortion circuit into the GEQ thing I did, I liked being able to add in some resonant peaks in the 2kHz to 6kHz range. When I did that though, it helped to have the high shelf filter sitting above that range to pull the higher frequencies back down so that it didn't get too grating.

What might be really slick is if you could come up with a circuit so that as you turned up the peak amplitude, it would automatically reduce the highs so you could keep the whole thing in a sort of balance.