[sdiy] More transistor woes (possibly off topic, but...)

[Elain Klopke]

So a bit back I was poking at making my own op-amps out of
transistors. Yeah, not so much with the working out at the moment.
However, I did find a schematic for a single transistor distortion
effect online. Just a few pieces, really simple, nice hard clipping.
It sounded really good at four in the morning when I tested it out. I
went to play with it the next afternoon because I was just really
excited and found that it liked my neighbor's radio far better than it
liked my bass guitar. Not letting my enthusiasm be dampened, I put in
a resistor to ground and capacitor right after the input to filter out
the RF noise and tried again. Thing didn't work anymore. Thinking
maybe I burned out the transistor, I soldered up another test board
with new components and the same layout. Again, no dice. I'm stumped.

Here's the link. And the guy's "schematic" isn't really the best....
http://www.instructables.com/id/Make-an-easy-guitar-distortion-pedal-STEP-BY-STEP/

But that's where I started.

And I got the info for the RF filter off of this link:
http://www.generalguitargadgets.com/richardo/distortion/index.html

Eventually I want to put a band pass filter or low pass filter after
the distortion stage, but not sure if I can just put the components in
the feedback loop like you would with an op-amp.