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Wednesday, 22 January 2014

The Tone God Blade

..and i'm back. Been a one hell of a month with kazillion things going on... Here's something quite cool i ran into. Haven't had time to build it yet myself, but it is quite high on the priority list. According to the information provided with the schematic (here), this seems like a highly tweakable crossover with impressive control over the waveform. The schematic suggests a use of a diode bridge, but i think we'll be just fine with four schottkys...

From the creator: Blade uses a diode bridge recitifer in the feedback loop of an inverting opamp to create crossover-like distortion. There are five controls. Drive adjusts how much signal is fed into the loop, Depth controls how strong the effect is, Sym (Pos) and Sym (Neg) affects the symentry of the signal by setting the level on the positive and negative sweeps of the signal, and a Level output control.

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13 comments:

  1. Dave22 January 2014 at 08:56

    Nice one, and good to have the both members of the dynamic duo back in action. I'll give this a go at some point, Im a big fan of crossover distortions, hideous in a cool way.

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  2. Alltrax7422 January 2014 at 10:17

    I have no idea how this is supposed to sound (couldn't find a video on youtube) ?

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  3. mirosol22 January 2014 at 11:50

    Those oscilloscope curves should tell you what to expect :)
    +m

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    1. Alltrax7422 January 2014 at 12:04

      Mm not really
      I searched for "crossover distortion" on youtube, it gave me a better idea :)
      Nice to see you back to business Miro

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    2. Dave22 January 2014 at 14:43

      Zvex machine is a good example of crossover distortion

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    3. Alltrax7422 January 2014 at 15:59

      Thanks I'll check that one

      Delete
  4. chumbox 22 January 2014 at 23:58

    Can I just replace the 1n5817 with another 1n4001 since its only power filtering from what I see?

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    1. Unknown23 January 2014 at 00:04

      I built this on a project board with and without the diode and it had no effect to the sound.

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    2. mirosol28 January 2014 at 19:56

      Chumbox: It's not for filtering, but added polarity protection. 1N5817 have less voltage drop than 1N4001's, but either will work just fine without any audible difference.
      +m

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  5. laky27 January 2014 at 09:29

    I breadboarded this prior to building. The drive pot can benefit from a larger value - maybe 250k, even up to 1m.

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  6. Unknown28 January 2014 at 18:49

    Built it over the weekend but I'm not sure if it's working as it should. The sym pots seem subtler than I was imagining. The drive seems nice but could do with a bit more, I'll try 1M that laky suggests at the weekend.

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    1. mirosol28 January 2014 at 19:57

      If you're getting crossover distortion, then i'd say it's working as it should. You could probably try log tapers for the sym pots for different feel.
      +m

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  7. Unknown17 October 2014 at 06:11

    hey,
    built it yesterday and used the following pots after a lil testing:
    1M for drive
    250 instead of 100k.
    50k instead of 10k.

    sym pots dont do much...
    with the gain pot cranked up its sounds decent enough like a heavy distortion with heavy compression and a lil high pitch whistling noise.
    are there any demos of this thing around ?

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