Filter Overdrive

[jean-charles maillet]

>I'm a newbie at most of this stuff, but I'd like to build an overdrive
>circuit in one of my synths. Would I just build a preamp between the
>oscillator and the filter? Should I do anything to subtract the extra gain? I
>know people have done this with 101's etc, could you please share your
>experiences? Thanks in advance.
>
>Ryan

If you're looking for plain old overdrive/distortion/fuzz you could build a
high gain amplifier around an op-amp and clip the output with diodes, such
as MXR's distortion+ circuit, or you could go for a variable duty-cycle
clipping circuit like the Fuzz Face which produces varying harmonics in
time and amplitude (requiring specific transistors) or you could build
Craig Anderton's Fuzz which has a very analog buzz to it and is very raspy
(almost unusable on guitar except for creating synth-like buzzing) ... all
three would produce fairly different types of distortion and I'm not sure
how they would sound on a synth ... you could always try overloading the
input of your filter stage with a preamp circuit but then things might get
ugly and difficult to control distortion levels depending on the input
sensitivity of the filter stage ...

jc

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