Distortion Effect Testing

I want to build this up at some point and see how it sounds. Adjust the potentiometer on the left side to change the signal level. This is an attempt at creating a “distortion effect” for instruments like guitar. Searching around it seems that many basic circuits for this effect use two parallel diodes to clip a signal to change the sound. This clipping creates a sudden transition each wave that’s large enough to get clipped and changes the sound to be more like a square wave aka very harsh sounding. The circuits I saw would amplify, clip, then either output or amplify again before sending to the power amplifier. The result is any larger signals from the input get severely chopped to around +/-0.7V before getting amplified. I’m just curious how different it might sound if instead the circuit sort of “tracked” the input to only clip off the top of the sine wave. I think this would create a softer sounding effect since it has less overall distortion. I believe by keeping the input signal low and fiddling with knobs you could mimic this effect with a regular distortion circuit but I’m worried keeping the signal so small then would keep the signal to noise ratio pretty large. I have just a small amount of experience with audio signals, I’m just experimenting on here because it’s a lot quicker than on a breadboard.

published 5 years ago