distortion

Effects Projects

Dead Easy Dirt V2 – Reboot of my old design

Back in 2012, I put together the simplest circuit I could think of, which was a couple caps, a resistor or two, some diodes, and an LM386 amplifier IC. I left out everything that was 100% necessary for a functional circuit, including polarity protection, pulldown resistor, and power filtering. Lots of people built that simple circuit, so I thought I would update it a bit to include a few basic improvements that I had omitted from the original. The design owes a lot to the Big Daddy from RunoffGroove.

This one is perfect for breadboarding and experimenting. Try different diode types for D2 / D3, add a gain control via a pot between pins 1 and 8, change up the input and output caps, throw a simple boost in front, etc.

Also works great for building on perf or vero/strip board.

Dead Easy Dirt

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Effects Projects

The Snitch: a ProCo Rat clone project

There are many Rat clone projects out there, but this one is mine. This is a part-for-part clone of the original Rat circuit. There are no extra pots or switches…just three knobs of ass-kicking tone in a small PCB form factor. It’s laid out for 1N4148 / 1N914 diodes, but you could use pretty much whatever you want to mimic the various Rat version. My suggestions:

  • 1N4148 / 1N914 – Classic Rat
  • LEDs (diffused) – Turbo Rat
  • BAT41 or similar Schottky diode – You Dirty Rat (please don’t waste a real Germanium diode on a YDR build)
  • 1x 1N914 + 1x LED – Overpriced boutique Rat variant with an unnecessarily self-aggrandizing name

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