Chuck D. Bones
Circuit Wizard
HamishR brought the Animals Diamond Peak Overdrive to my attention. Animals is a Japan-based boutique pedal builder. They collaborated with Marc (Skreddy) Ahlfs on the design. It's based on the Skreddy Major, which spawned the Lunar Module, Screw Driver, Hybrid Fuzz Driver, and so on. Marc is moving away from Germanium 
because it's a problem part in a production environment. HamishR bought a Diamond Peak and traced it. The only problem he encountered was the unmarked SMD capacitors. So we had to do some guesswork, based on the related Skreddy pedals. We ended up with this familiar circuit:
Mr. Ahlfs uses low-gain silicon transistors in place of germanium. Capacitors with red ref des are our best guesses. That's all well and good, but we wanted the BASS control back. Easy enough to do. I was dissatisfied with the limited range on the TONE control. While I was stirring things up, I redid Q1's bias network. This was my result:
White: VOLUME - Red: TREBLE - Blue: BASS - Green: GAIN
I used some Martian transistors that John at K Pedals gave me. Their HFE is in the mid 70s. Any high-gain, low-noise trans will work for Q1. This thing has plenty of gain and sounds good across the range of all four controls. It sounds particularly good when GAIN is below 10:00. Different transistors will bias differently, so you might want to fiddle R11 to dial-in the bias. On mine, with a 9.2V supply and no signal, Q1-C is at +4.98V and Q3-C is at +4.35V. YMMV. Plays nicely with single-coils or humbuckers.
because it's a problem part in a production environment. HamishR bought a Diamond Peak and traced it. The only problem he encountered was the unmarked SMD capacitors. So we had to do some guesswork, based on the related Skreddy pedals. We ended up with this familiar circuit:
Mr. Ahlfs uses low-gain silicon transistors in place of germanium. Capacitors with red ref des are our best guesses. That's all well and good, but we wanted the BASS control back. Easy enough to do. I was dissatisfied with the limited range on the TONE control. While I was stirring things up, I redid Q1's bias network. This was my result:
White: VOLUME - Red: TREBLE - Blue: BASS - Green: GAIN
I used some Martian transistors that John at K Pedals gave me. Their HFE is in the mid 70s. Any high-gain, low-noise trans will work for Q1. This thing has plenty of gain and sounds good across the range of all four controls. It sounds particularly good when GAIN is below 10:00. Different transistors will bias differently, so you might want to fiddle R11 to dial-in the bias. On mine, with a 9.2V supply and no signal, Q1-C is at +4.98V and Q3-C is at +4.35V. YMMV. Plays nicely with single-coils or humbuckers.
