Bluesbreaker mods

[irmcdermott]

Hey guys,

Need some help. I've been searching and searching but can't seem to find anything concrete on this. I've built the GGG Bluesbreaker, and as I have read about the Bluesbreaker, the thing has to be almost cranked to get unity. Are there any mods that you can do to get a little more output out of this? Not necessarily more distortion, but just more headroom out of it? Any help would be much appreciated.

[culturejam]

You want more headroom or more output volume?

Either way, you can swap out the stock clippers for LEDs and it gets a bit louder.

[irmcdermott]

I think the range of distortion is fine, I want the output to be more. I'm looking around DIYSB (for some rason forgot to look there) and finding some interesting leads there now. Like changing the taper of the volume pot to linear, but more interestingly, replacing the volume pot of the BB with a fixed resistor and feeding the output into something like an LBP-1 and using that as the volume knob.

Could be cool...

[irmcdermott]

Maybe something like this? I'll have to breadboard it, may be while, about to spend quite a bit of time on the road for work.

Few notes. R15 and R16 would be to replace the pot (i *think* i have that right). I took out what would have been R13 in the GGG schematic.

[irmcdermott]

Since the volume pot in the original isn't tied to ground at lug one, do I need to replace it with two resistors? Or can it just be one? Love learning and applying stuff.... when it's correct

Ian

[oldhousescott]

Yeah, your drawing should work. For starters, I would suggest you temporarily keep the original output pot so you can determine the max volume output without the LPB1 distorting (may be hard to do with drive up enough to cause clipping). I would expect there will be a point where it stops getting louder, and the character of the sound changes. Then you can measure the resistances for R15 and R16 in your drawing.

Another option would be to build an opamp buffer set up for a gain of 2 or 3. That should give you plenty of output level.

[irmcdermott]

Thanks. Hope to get this on the breadboard when I'm back in about a week or so.

[Dulouz]

I understand this is a pretty old thread and I'm not sure what the exact etiquette is on thread resurrection is around here. Don't shoot! I'm new!

Did this project ever get built or breadboarded? I'm working on a fairly similar project and I would really like to know what values are of the two resistors that replaced the original volume pot.

Thanks!