distortion Archives - EffDub Audio

After much tweaking and some setbacks, I’m pleased to announce that my take on the classic “hard-rock / vintage metal” sound is, at long last, ready for public consumption. This one is 100% “discrete” in the sense that there are no integrated circuit components (operation amplifiers or other ICs). It’s all field-effect transistors doing the amplifying and clipping…there aren’t even any clipping diodes in this circuit. There ARE diodes in the circuit, but they are for polarity and over-voltage protection (not in the audio path). Read More

Effects Projects

September 21, 2024 effdub

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. Read More

Effects Projects

July 13, 2023 effdub

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