Macheen not too "macheeny"

[bigrigg]

Has anyone else found their macheen to be almost just distortion/od vs the ugly sounding macheen you'd expect on it's own?  I made the 4 knob version.  Sounds good.  I can get a bit of the "cross over" thing especially in front of another dirt effect but it doesn't seem nearly as extreme as the "zvex" demos.  On it's own, it's fairly tame.
Maybe some trans or diode alternatives would work?  Any advice is greatly appreciated.
thanks

[stecykmi]

i have not made this circuit, however, i noticed that the 2n3906/2n3904 pairs both used 47k emitter resistors. to increase the offset, i think you can swap one of these values out, though i would guess that it's pretty sensitive so i wouldn't deviate too much. alternatively, since the 2n3904/2n3906 are a matched pair, you could try mismatching the transistors with either with a low gain transistor (maybe a leaky germanium) or a very high one such as the (npn) MPSA18.

decreasing R15 may also increase the diode clipping if you're looking for more grit. swapping the clipping diodes, in general, will greatly influence the character of the distortion. Brian himself often recommends BAT41's as clipping diodes. silicon diodes will probably have less distortion because due to their higher Vf.

again i haven't tried this, so i recommend either socketing these parts or breadboarding it first. no guarantees!

[GermanCdn]

Built one, and it's a pretty polar pedal in my opinion, in that you either love it or you don't.  I teamed mine up in front of a Wolfshirt and use it in my bass rig, and for that it does a good job.  I haven't taken the time to compare it to the Z demos, but the truth is if you put five Z pedals side by each, they all probably wouldn't sound like that demo either due to variance in the components.