Every once in a while, I’ll dig through my box of forgotten designs and stumble across one that picks my interest. A lot of times I won’t remember what’s actually in the box or what circuit I designed so it’s almost like a rediscovery of where I was in that moment in time. Now not all designs turn out to be great. Some of them I end up coming back to and re-tweaking to make it useful or further evolve the circuit, but that doesn’t always work out. However, this time turned out to be quite the surprise.
The one that I’m talking about today is a high gain, almost amp-in-a box design that I built about four years ago for project that never came to fruition. At the time, I was trying to capture an amp in the box sound that I had in my head, which I felt like I was able to capture, but ultimately decided I needed to have more gain on tap. I have plugged it up previously using my main test amp (Gibson Falcon III) and speaker (Eminence Texas Heat). The sound was kind of just, meh. Didn’t have the bite I was looking for or the right crunch that I felt it needed. So I put it back in the box.
Fast forward a few years later. I swapped out that same test speaker with a new one. One that is better voiced for cleans as well as high gains. Plugged up the pedal and voilà. High gain saturation that sounded like a very angry Marshall amp pushed far past what it’s limits.
On lower gain settings, the pedal gives a broken up Plexi sound. At higher gain settings, the pedal delivers the sound of a JCM800 being slammed with two boosts. Does it chug? Oh yes, it chugs.
To my ears, it needs just to touch more tweaking before I feel that it’s ready. Really I think the EQ controls are the main thing that it needs to have added to it. I would keep the current tone control as it is but add a resonance and presence control.