Cherrybomb (Colorsound Overdriver)

[pandadandan]

The front is the same as always, so no point showing that.  On with the retro guts!

[bigmufffuzzwizz]

Mooojooo!! cool man! I'm curious how it sounds! 

[stecykmi]

beauty!

[revmayer]

Looks great.  I too would love to hear how it sounds.  It is defiantly on my list of future builds.

[jkokura]

Cool Background cloth. They make cool pedals over in Japan!

I still wanna see the front though, graphics are important!

Also, phenomenal wiring. Real neat. I like the clean smooth rounded lines. The wire looks quite thin, is it stranded or solid? Gauge?

Jacob

[bigmufffuzzwizz]

Also, phenomenal wiring. Real neat. I like the clean smooth rounded lines.

At second glance i have to agree. That wiring job is nearly flawless. Making it look to damn simple!

[pandadandan]

Kind of misbiased at the moment I think.  Not entirely sure of the reason, so I may have to do some transistor swapping or something. 

Anyway,
The clean boost is awesome and loud as hell, as is the fully-cranked fuzz sound.  However, with the gain in the "overdrive" zone, it crackles in a fairly odd way when you dig in with the strings; not an overdrive as such but more blatty.

Aside from that, great.  Once I've tweaked it, I'm sure it'll be residing on the board.

[madbean]

What transistors did you use? I've run into some "blatiness" with 2n2222 before. I'd take some readings on yours to see how the voltages look. It might simply require a different collector resistor somewhere.

[Diamond]

That is inherent to the circuit. You either get a great clean boost for about the first 90% of the pot or a kind of splatty fuzz at the very end of the pot. There's only about 5% in between and it really does not sound that great. Biassing won't help that. I liked BC107B's in in my veroboard build of this circuit, but 2N5089's also work great.

You have to keep in mind that this is an old circuit and it really doesn't work like modern overdrives, like Tube Screamers or such. I had great results with feeding it 18 volts by the way. Makes it sound a lot fatter. Some older version of the pedal where built for 18 volts.

[pandadandan]

What transistors did you use? I've run into some "blatiness" with 2n2222 before. I'd take some readings on yours to see how the voltages look. It might simply require a different collector resistor somewhere.

Q1/Q3 = 3904
Q2 = 2222A

At voltage 9.43
Collector at Q1 is 1.75
Collector at Q2 is 5.10
Collector at Q3 is 6.43 <---- A wee bit steep.  I'll up R13 to 2k or 2k2 to see how that changes things

The fuzz sound is godly though.  Great tone controls too.

[garfo]

That is inherent to the circuit. You either get a great clean boost for about the first 90% of the pot or a kind of splatty fuzz at the very end of the pot. There's only about 5% in between and it really does not sound that great. Biassing won't help that. I liked BC107B's in in my veroboard build of this circuit, but 2N5089's also work great.

You have to keep in mind that this is an old circuit and it really doesn't work like modern overdrives, like Tube Screamers or such. I had great results with feeding it 18 volts by the way. Makes it sound a lot fatter. Some older version of the pedal where built for 18 volts.

Ei, did you use bc107b for the three transistors?at the moment i have 2n3565 for Q1 and Q3 and a 2n2222A for Q2.In this case would it be ok to feed it with 18 volts?
By the way, I did some more research and read somewhere that to get rid off the splatty sound one needs to remove the 10uf cap that sets under the volume pot and wire it instead.Apparently that will decrease gain arround 6x and it will bring this pedal more into overdrive territory, which in my case is perfect.
Well, I don't know wich one it would be on the madbean board, but there are only two, so it is very easy to give it a try.

[deafbutpicky]

Hi,
maybe this is old news, but C9 in the cherrybomb schematic is oriented in the wrong direction.

I stumbled upon this while hunting down the splatty noise in higher gain settings note decay. I always thought
it had to be something bias related, and tonight, after measuring the x-ed time, cursing on my transistors
I noticed there's a dc path to ground over Q1's emitter from this cap, so orientation has to be significant.
I compared it with what seems to be the original schem, swapped and turned the cap and all splattyness was gone...