Tuesday 4 December 2012

Colorsound Tonebender Re-Issue

It was surprisingly hard to find a description about this '90s IC powered re-issue. Well. So hard that i didn't find any. Some demo videos are floating around the web....



17 comments:

  1. Nice work, Verified. Never seen an IC tonebender before so had to have a go. Just built this, quite sharp and fierce with the tone at full tilt. Its probably worth mentioning (for the newbies out there) that if D1 is omitted then a bridge will be required otherwise no voltage will get through, thanks

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks! And good thing to note that omitting D1.. I'm too accustomed to assuming stuff i shouldn't :)
      +m

      Delete
    2. Oh. And that was fast :D
      +m

      Delete
  2. It was a really quick build, about 45 mins all in! Much easier with the IC, avoids all that nasty transistor biasing! Thanks again.

    ReplyDelete
  3. If you can't find a 25k pot - just connect a 50k pot in parallel with a 50k-ish resistor, and it'll work just the same :)

    ReplyDelete
  4. I have a 10k log pot I was going to use in place of the 25k, which of the 1u capacitors should I replace for the 2u2? Also don't have a 100k lin for the tone, can I use a 50k and modify a resistor value elsewhere? Cheers!

    ReplyDelete
  5. Not as powerful as I thought it would be. Also, the fuzz potonly starts to bring the gain at nearly all the way up. The tone kind of takes away volume. Any ideas?

    ReplyDelete
  6. I actually took out D1 and placed a jumper in its spot which kind of fixed the issues I was having. I've seen that both the TL071 and TL072 have similar pinouts, although the 72 is a dual. Being a noob to electronics, how much of the layout would I have to change in order to use the 72?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Complete redraw.
      www.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/tl071a.pdf‎

      I'm having hard time believing that polarity protection diode will affect the sound enough to notice it. All Tonebenders are quieter than expected by default.

      You could try smaller pot for fuzz, like 10K. And you could try upping the 100K resistor in parallel to clipping diodes to get more gain.
      +m

      Delete
    2. Buenas. Construí el mismo. Suena retro, me gusta, pero como dicen por ahí ..le falta ganancia. ¿Podría colocar un potenciómetro de 250K reemplazando la resistencia de 100k para obtener más ganacia y así poder regularla?

      Delete
    3. Ya le cambié la resistencia de 100k pot un potenciómetro de 500 k. Tiene más ganacia, más fuzz. Pero noté que tocando despúes del traste 12 las notas se cortan.

      Delete
  7. Evening!

    I built this board just to give it a try, I felt curious about a "tonebender" made with an IC, and was sure that it would be a total crap. Anyway, is a 10 minutes build, so worth a try, and man...

    Is not a tonebender, far away from a germanium or even silicon MKII - III, but it sounds nice to my ears. More on overdrive than a fuzz, but sounds really fine for a so little circuit. Surely it will get boxed (1590A, of course).

    The only issue is that the fuzz knob has to be definetely antilog, even with a lin the fuzz is on the last 20% of the sweep.

    Give it a try!

    ReplyDelete
  8. A little sound sample of my build :)

    https://soundcloud.com/p8t8r/how-many-more-fuzz

    ReplyDelete
  9. For future visitors to this page, I've just seen inside one of these in eBay and the tone section resistors are 2.2k not 33k. Hope that helps.

    ReplyDelete
  10. And the capacitor that connects to the diodes and pin 6 of the IC is 4.7uf

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes i agree about the 4.7uf, having seen 3 different photos of the inside circuit. 33k and 2.2k can look very similar though, with one being three bands of orange+gold, and the other being three bands of red+gold. Did you try the 2.2k's/ how did it sound?

      Delete