best circuit for getting the late django sound?

[add4]

There is more into a lot of brains that in one.
That's why i'd like to ask you this question:
Which would be, according to your experience, the best circuit to get close to the electric Django Reinhardt sound?
it's coming from a lightly/medium overdriven amp.

2 situations i'd like to consider:
- input is an acoustic gypsy guitar.
- input is a jazz archtop.

examples of the sound i'm talking about

to me the job could be done with a simple electra distortion with heavy low pass filter in the end (+ a stupidly wonderful tone control that would make it versatile enough to be used with an electric and an acoustic?)

Or should it be more medium boosting?

[alanp]

I have a strong suspicion that feel, rhythm, and dexterity will play a larger part than subtleties of overdrive.

That, and I'm just posting in a thread about a guitarist I love to hear

[add4]

Of course there is not a magic pedal to give that feel, rhythmic placement and note choice of anybody, but the same guitar work, played through a dr boogie, might not sound like that too

The fact is that a lot of people in the gypsy jazz scene are going for this sound with a tubescreamer and a clean amp (what's on stage usually). And I thought that maybe another family of circuits might be better suited for that kind of sound.
I'm hearing a variation on Electra here but I am curious of what you guys think.

[drolo]

Perhaps something a little more primitive and crude than a TS would work great here.
I'm thinking of a colorsound overdriver for example.
I had great fun with the cherrybomb I built from madbean.
The only thing about it is that with some settings there is a bit of fizz but I found that with a very mildly set overdrive after it, or anything that will filter out the fizz, it sounds excellent. Very responsive to dynamics and guitar volume too if no buffer in between the two.

[jtaormina]

I think you need a really old fat body guitar, fast fingers, a really old tube amp with a bunch of old parts inside and a really old recording console. In fact I'd bet the recording console/equipment played a large part in the sound. That recording is old and so is the technology that made it.

Likely the amp was easily over driven. Not sure the age of this recording but old amps distorted easily.  But if had to guess it wasn't completely intentional.

[alanp]

Listening to the youtube vid I linked (not my video), I suspect that mic placement will go a long way, as will the right kind of guitar and frets.

[add4]

Thanks to you all,

i was thinking something like a lavache with a bandaxall behind it, so i guess that's kinda close to Drolo's suggestion: basic transistor based light OD with a bandaxall after it.

I'm going to order a cherrybomb pcb and try it, or maybe just create a pcb for lavache and order it, that will make me play with eagle again

Thanks to you all for your suggestions

[samhay]

A big part of that sound is the almost complete lack of sustain you get from an acoustic archtop guitar. You can only do so much with finger damping.
Once you have found the flavour of distortion you like, you might try adding a simple noise gate - series diodes bypassed with a variable resistor to see if you can get a bit closer.

On a different note, I recently read an interesting article about trying to emulate old bluegrass recordings. The idea that old instruments (it was about banjos, but argument stands) sound like their recordings is somewhat wrong. The instruments probably sound pretty similar to today's equivalent, but after recording with very limited bandwidth and headroom, we have come to thing of them sounding very different.

[add4]

well for my purpose here, we can safely assume that the guitare are either
- gypsy jazz acoustic guitars with an added microphone (can be magnetic (stimer, peche a la mouche, ...), piezo, or classical instrument microphone (lots of feedback, generally not used))
- bix bog archtop with a floating pickup or a humbucker.

People usually specialize in this style and have the equipement for it. if you have the right guitar and amp, it's actually failry easy to get close to that tone, like Sebastien Giniaux here:

the main idea behind my question is : with an archtop and the good finger technique/playing style, how do i add the right OD to get tone from a clean amp.

Some players buy a small wattage tube amp that they push naturally and get it, but it's not always the case and they are stuck with this sound for the whole gig. i would like to get the chance to change it, maybe even in a solo (BIG novelty in the gypsy jazz style ). so i'd like a pedal that soudns like this, ideally in a clean solid state amp

[raulduke]

I would agree that the (old) recording equipment used will play a large part in the sound.

I find that a Bandpass filter set to a wide bandwidth (ie. low resonance) can give a nice 'old school' sound to things as it cuts of the high and low end of signals (old recordings have a very limited bandwidth).

Old recordings also have a limited dynamic range, so some light compression may not go amiss.

Maybe Madbeans Flabulanche might be worth a go as there is compression, overdrive (JFET) and tone controls all built in?


At the end of the day you are going to have to experiment and find what works for you.