This is Part II of a multi part series on building your own effects. See Part I Here.

So, I cooked my own distortion. To the left you can see the schematic that I ended up with. This is modified from a schematic Here. The two bits on the left and the right are the input and output respectively. Please excuse the lameness of the schematic. Jonathan hooked me up with Dia, and while its relatively simple to use, I didn't really want to fart around with it that much, I just needed to get a quick and dirty schematic up. So it is quick, and dirty.

And It works! Its not perfect, but it works! It makes a really nice crunchy grindey distortion, but it is also somewhat 'clean' in its distortion. Its not at all like overdriving a Mackie. I do like the sound. The next step is to try and figure out why the output is so low. I tried playing around with the value of the 400K resistor, but it didn't seem to make much of a difference. After I have this thing in fully working order, I am going to play around with adding some more in the "feedback loop" between the 2222A and the 2 diodes. I am probably going to had a sweepable low pass and sweepable high pass filter.

Once I have all these basics down, I am going to look at making the thing pluggable. I want to eventually have it so you can change out the feedback generator (i.e. switch to an op-amp), Add things to the feedback loop, pre-distortion and post-distortion.

All this work has also given me an idea on what a good electronics prototyping breadboard needs. Right now I am using Shells "Vulcan Logic Trainer", which has all kinds of interesting bells and whistles, for... well... logic programming. Not so good for audio. Hell, when I was testing it, I was forced into holding 1/4 inch plugs up to the bare wire. Bah. Suckage.