Cool video on Designing an Overdrive Pedal

[Joe Garfield]

(Edit: hopefully this isn’t taking away from the thread - it looks like a cool project!)
Good points - my shortcoming (well, one of many) is not knowing what a ‘good’ op amp is. I know they exist in recording studios and stuff, but I also know cheap consumer ones can sound like crap.

Maybe in a pedal it doesn’t matter as much, and ‘cheap’ op amps might even have desirable sound!

I wonder if one of these would work:
https://sparkoslabs.com/discrete-op-amps/

Thanks for the link - I’ve never built a pedal and this looks like one I might try in the future.

[jugglindan]

(Edit: hopefully this isn’t taking away from the thread - it looks like a cool project!)
Good points - my shortcoming (well, one of many) is not knowing what a ‘good’ op amp is. I know they exist in recording studios and stuff, but I also know cheap consumer ones can sound like crap.

Maybe in a pedal it doesn’t matter as much, and ‘cheap’ op amps might even have desirable sound!

I wonder if one of these would work:
https://sparkoslabs.com/discrete-op-amps/

Thanks for the link - I’ve never built a pedal and this looks like one I might try in the future.

It's not taking away from the thread at all. I enjoy these conversations wherever they might lead. While expensive op amps with "better" specs definitely exist (lower noise, tighter tolerances etc), they are not always that helpful in effect pedals, particularly overdrive pedals. My $200 modded tubescreamer sounds fantastic, as does my Barber CDD that I build recently. The op amp in both cost less than $2. I swapped them for a $0.30 4558D op amp I bought on eBay and couldn't hear a difference. In soft-clipped overdrives, the clipping diodes can make a much larger difference to the sound. In fact, it's all the stuff that surrounds the op amp (tone circuits, filtering capacitor choices, clipping diodes, number of gain stages etc) that makes most of the difference in sound.

Also this: