Build Your Own Clone Message Board

I have a larger beaver and i want to try and improve clarity on note seperation and trasparency of my guitar tone....while taming flabby bass....

any mods around to do this?.....is it possible to toggle between stock and any mods?

thanks

First, make sure your build compares favorably to other LB/BMP builds in terms of sonic quality by checking out various clips, videos, and recordings. If you're sure it's working up to par, just not what exactly what you're looking for, then the tone stack is the place to start.

On the bottom edge of the board, you'll see a .0039 cap, two 39K resistors, and a .01 cap in the same general vicinity. These components plus the tone pot make up the tone network. You can adjust the component values to taste. You'll probably want to use the following tool. It has a Big Muff tone network built in, and you can dynamically view the results of value changes.

http://www.duncanamps.com/tsc/

With that said, I haven't experienced a problem with flabby bass, or clarity for that matter, with triangle-based circuits. However, I'm usually playing through relatively low wattage American and Brit-flavored combos that don't have the bass response of a 4x12 cab to begin with.

With component value changes, you can certainly roll off some bass to reduce flab, but take a look at TSC and watch the curve as you increase the tone control setting. A rolloff of bass frequencies occurs accompanied by an increase in treble frequencies. So changing values just to get less/more bass or less/more treble doesn't buy you a lot over the control you already have with the pot.

While the tone control can dramatically affect bass and treble frequencies, watch the midrange on the graph. You don't have much control over that. The stock circuit has a sizable dip in the midrange around 1kHz or so. By changing a single component, you can increase this dip or flatten it. Most folks prefer to flatten out the dip as opposed to making it bigger, but I wouldn't necessarily call this an increase in clarity. It certainly helps to prevent your tone from getting lost in the mix by making it more forward sounding. An extreme example is the stock 808 circuit which has a pronounced midrange push.

Take a search for the mids scoop/flat/boost mod Keith posted a while back. That gives you the ability to have switchable control over midrange response. As of this writing, it's only about three posts down from this one.

Thanks for the info! really useful!!

A couple of ideas here.

The LB schematic is missing a resistor to ground from the base of Q2. This is based on a well known triangle-era schematic but a lot of people think it's wrong because it messes up the bias of Q2 and it's present in every other transistor based version out there. Adding a resistor (82k-100k) in that position may help things for you.

When I modded my NYC Big Muff to triangle values I also replaced the 150 ohm resistor with an 820 ohm. Not sure what that does to the bias, but it sounded a lot clearer and less muddy after I did it.

Hi Paladin2019

Thanks for the tip!!! do you know of a schematic i could follow to add this resistor? do you have a recommendation on how to do it to the BYOC LB?

The reason i'm doing it is because i'm trying to nail that David Gilmour sound!!

Thanks man

I haven't done it on an LB, but it should be simple enough. As far as I can see Q2 is the transistor in the top right hand corner of the board, sitting between the LED and the 560pF cap. On the underside of the board, you'll see a wiggly connection line coming from the middle transistor leg weaving its way to five other solder points. All you have to do is connect the resistor to any solder point on that line, and connect the other end of the resistor to a solder point that goes to ground (ie. connects to the strip that runs all the way around the edge of the board).

If you want a Gilmour sound, I will echo callmerog and recommend modifying the tone stack a little. There has been a lot of discussion on this board about the 3-way mids switch (scoop, flat, boost) and it's worth looking into. If you don't want to add a switch to your build then I would recommend simply swapping the 0.0039 and 0.01 caps to give you a slight mid boost.

Please see this post. I show pictures of the resistor in question...

http://board.buildyourownclone.com/viewtopic.php?t=5449

[EDIT] This resistor, as well as the cap I mention in that thread, won't necessarily make the pedal into a Gilmour machine. However, the resistor does indeed correct the bias of the Q2 transistor which has a small (but I think noticeable in many cases) affect on the distortion character. I add it to every build, and the cap mentioned in that thread on most of them.

My favorite simple thing to do to get a more Gilmourish tone is increase the value of the 39K resistor next to the .0039 cap in the tone section. Values of 82K to 100K work well to smooth out the midrange dip without eliminating it. The resulting sound is still very BMP, but fuller and more forward.

Much more on the Beaver to come as soon as my little corner of the forum is created... poke, poke, Matt

superb tips guys, will look into them as soon as i get my soldering iron out again!!!

if you have any more ideas....let me know!!!

sorry...forgot to say will let you know how it goes......i'm re-boxing the pedal into something bigger and might add some sort of dip swith thing to try and add all the options you have mentioned, being as the resistor values are spread a little....perhaps i need to have that "tweak ability"? to get the gilmour sound with my amp/pickups?

good work guys!!

start a bigg muff/ larger beaver forum section!!! we need it!!!!.....

The Creamy Dreamer Mod seems to be for a lead sound, more punch less sustain.
But you need BC550B transitors from smallbear.

How do they compare to the stock trannies?

The have a lower hfe, not extremely low. The stock 2N5088 didn't work at all with the Creamy Dreamer Mod. The collector voltage wouldn't get high enough.

Interesting results. I've done the Creamy Dreamer mod with 2N5088s, 2N5089s, and 2N5133s with no issues. All had dramatically more sustain and gain - too much, in fact, for most styles of music unless you like it really heavy. With this mod, the Sustain control at minimum picks up where it leaves off at maximum without the mod.

Here's an example I quickly recorded for someone a few days back. The Sustain control is at 10:00 on this clip - not even halfway.

http://toejampedals.com/clips/tjcp108_a.mp3

in regards to flabby bass...
i had this large beaver problem too with humbucking pickups on my guitar. keith suggested turning my guitar volume down just a touch, just so its not not maxed out. it helped big time.