Pedal Family Trees?

BuddytheReow said:
Your best bet is to research the "classics" under the hood and be able to discern the different topologies. A muff looks VERY different than a rat or tubescreamer on a schematic. Then start branching out from there. You biggest hurdle, IMO, will be fuzz territory unless you do your homework on what came first. Once you can quickly identify a circuit category you can then dive in to see what that designer did differently (more controls, different component values, etc.).

I've said it in other posts: there really isn't an "original" circuit anymore but rather tweaked circuit LEGOS stuck together.
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I just wish there was a standard way of drawing schematics. You can draw them differently have the same schematic look nothing alike at first glance.
 
I think the real categories can be divided by topology more than single model:
- Cascading stages ( maestro, tone bender, fuzz face..)
- cascading stages with soft clipping (BMP..)
- hard clipping (Dist+, Rat, klon...)
- soft clipping (OD-1, Tube screamer, SD1...)
- FET amp emulators (plexi drive, dirty little secret...)
- overdriven opamp (LM386 based distortions)


I don't remember other types at the moment, anyway the 99.9% of the distortion pedals falls in one of these categories
 
My theory is that the Timmy was derived from a Tubescreamer. If you take a Tubescreamer, remover the buffers at each end, simplify the tone section and add a bass control - which are all pretty standard things to do when modifying a pedal - you might end up with a Timmy. Of course it's not as simple as that... Paul Cochran tuned it extremely well. But that's where I think it came from. Removing the buffers from a TS is a famous mod - was it Jack Orman who first made it popular? Then you end up with the long list of Eternity pedals and a million other TGP staples.

More obvious but no less remarkable "mod of existing circuit" could be the BJF Honey Bee and the series of pedals that followed. Based on the Rat, but cleverly modded to the point where the sound is entirely different.

My favourite Muff derivative is definitely the Basic Audio Alter Destiny. Absolutely brilliant dirt box. It has all the bits of the Muff which I like - ok, there aren't actually that many - and creates something capable of a wider range of sounds than the original.

And when you look at what Skreddy has been able to do with modifying a Fuzz Face - the guy is a genius!

Having said all that, I don't really think it is necessarily Pedal PCB's role to document a "pedal family tree". Why would it be?
 
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