Here's a collection of vero (stripboard) and tagboard guitar and bass effect layouts that we have put together covering many classic and popular effects in growing numbers. Many of these have been posted on freestompboxes.org, so check that site out for great discussions on building your own effect pedals. Enjoy the builds and please also visit us on Facebook and Twitter
Info about the original: The HEAT BLASTER delivers a truly modern distortion sound, with a
tone control plus high-cut and low-cut switches for additional tonal
adjustment. The high-cut switch attenuates the presence frequencies in order to
produce a mellow tone that retains good projection. With the high-cut
switch engaged you can use the tone control to achieve the required
degree of projection. This type of setting is ideal for solos. The
low-cut switch attenuates the low frequencies, making it easy to attain
an ideal blend with bass and drums for a well-balanced band sound. The
low-cut switch affects low frequencies that normally cannot be adjusted
using amplifier tone controls.
Sure enough, there's something quite familiar going on in there. Talking about a vision that came to the designer in a dream...
[Updated 4th July 2014 - correction to treble control resistors]
The older Klon layout was starting to annoy me for a few reasons so I decided to re-do it and start a new thread as this one is obviously currently unverified, and so all discussion here can relate to this layout.
This is a couple of rows smaller and so should fit more easily into a 1590B, and I have included the bass pot mod from the outset so if that's something you don't want to include you can just omit the 150n cap and bass pot itself.
Note that IC3 is rotated 180 degrees from the usual orientation.
Marketing spiel:
"..... Available soon.
No, honestly!"
And a extra modified version which uses a fat switch instead of an additional bass pot, and also includes a Soft Clipping switch to allow you to add your favourite clipping diodes in the feedback loop of the gain stage. This switch is a DPDT on/off/on and will allow you to use two back to back pairs, with a centre off position which will be the standard Klon mode. The main germanium shunt diodes could also be removed from the board and put on a switch allowing you to remove the hard clipping completely, and/or maybe adding the option of a different type of diode in one position, and the stock germaniums in the other, to give you extra flavours and maximum versatility.
For another modification consider using two 100K pots for "Gain" and "Clean" instead of the dual linear pot. This will give you maximum versatility by allowing you to control both sides of the control independently, and people have noted having good results doing so, giving them additional tones that are impossible to get with the stock Klon configuration.
These layouts are based on Martin Chittum's April 2009 updated schematic (correction to treble resistors included - 4th July 2014), with the only alteration being increased 100u filter caps on both 9V and 18V sides. The bass pot addition is as per Madbean's mod suggestion.
There's a partial schematic up at FSB, missing all non-polarized cap values. I thought it would be a nice idea to take a guess at them. The values i selected should take the sound close to the original unit. Of course, if any of you have better guesses on the values, let me know. This design has three clipping stages (not gain stages as PGS demo suggests) and overall footprint isn't your usual copy of a copy. There's a lot of gain coming out of a single TL072 too...
Request. Another great sounding, extremely well made and very fairly priced effect from Dave Barber. As usual with Barber I'd always say buy this or one of his other pedals to support one of the good builders.
Measuring only 2.3” wide, the NEW Compact Direct Drive brings a colossal catalog of vintage British voice to your pedal-board. We packed the most desirable sounds of the Direct Drive, Direct Drive Low Gain (LG) and Super Sport into one clean and compact pedal. If you like the sound of the early UK combos with kt66 tubes, it's in there. If you bleed for the sound of a 4 input head with a wall of 4x12 cabs, it's in there. If you live for the sound of a carefully modified master volume gem from the early 80's, it's in there too. The Compact Direct Drive uses a simple layout of three knobs, a gain toggle and a harmonics toggle to delivery it's wide array from elastic-bells of GZ34-sag, to the hells-bells of a tight EL34-crush. Throw away the clock, tell the family you're taking a solo holiday, there is a Compact Direct Drive on the way.
I listened to the clip of this last night and thought it sounded awesome for such a small circuit, so had to do the layout. Another bonus is that it uses common transistors so no searching for unobtainium, or having to get something in specially.
