[sdiy] FETs for distortion

[Seb Francis]

Scott Gravenhorst wrote:

>Seb Francis <seb at burnit.co.uk> wrote:
>  
>
>>Hi Jim,
>>
>>Thanks for your reply.
>>
>>I have heard it said that FETs give a softer clipping than BJTs, hence 
>>wanting to try them.  
>>    
>>
>
>I used a 4069UB (or a 4007, can't recall) MOSFET pair as a soft clipper to
>turn a triangle waveform into a sine-like waveform.  I thought it worked
>quite well, it's very simple to do this, just run it in "linear" mode.  I
>still need to play with this for other audio sounds, like guitar.  I've
>read that MOSFETs used like this can yield a vacuum tube like distortion.
>  
>

Do you mean 4049UB (actually it's not very obvious from the datasheets 
what the difference is between 4049 and 4069)?  This is another thing 
that I've been intending to try out (I've seen it used in a few 
distortion circuits, but until now I didn't think of it as a MOSFET).

Seb