Adding “threshold” led to Muffler sanity check

[han-tyumi]

Working on a muffler as part of an all in one board for a friend and they asked about adding the NS-2 style led.

From my understanding of the circuit and how the NS-2 / others handle it wouldn’t it just be a matter of running said led off of Q2’s emitter with a small CLR around 100-330r?
I know the NS-2 is more involved than this build but I based my deductions on just comparing the two circuits and my understanding of using LEDs this way in general electronics. I don’t have a lot of experience with noise gates specifically other than repairing a few. So anyone who can confirm, or has insight on any way of doing it appropriately is appreciated

 

[Feral Feline]

NS-2?

Breadboard these ideas...

CODA's Noise gate mod: add a 100k trimpot (wired as a variable resistor) parallel to the 100k to ground of the second gain stage. Adjust trimmer to taste.
Actually, Coda got the MOD FROM KIT RAE.
Speaking of Kit Rae...
Consider adding JEN's Germanium noise gate mod to your friend's Muff-build. You could stick it on vero or perf and insert it between the second clipping stage and tone-stack.

Nothin' to do with noise-gate for all I know, but I've been wanting to try this Zorg Effects suggestion:
ZORG's Bias mod: changes the bias of the output stage with a 1M pot in parallel of the voltage-divider resistor.

 

[han-tyumi]

NS-2?

Breadboard these ideas...

CODA's Noise gate mod: add a 100k trimpot (wired as a variable resistor) parallel to the 100k to ground of the second gain stage. Adjust trimmer to taste.
Actually, Coda got the MOD FROM KIT RAE.
Speaking of Kit Rae...
Consider adding JEN's Germanium noise gate mod to your friend's Muff-build. You could stick it on vero or perf and insert it between the second clipping stage and tone-stack.

Nothin' to do with noise-gate for all I know, but I've been wanting to try this Zorg Effects suggestion:
ZORG's Bias mod: changes the bias of the output stage with a 1M pot in parallel of the voltage-divider resistor.

Good info on some things I did and didn’t know before thank you.

The NS-2 is the fairly ubiquitous boss noise suppressor that has a led indicator for when the gate is clamped with the brightness varying depending on how clamped it is. Normally I would assume this to be tied to the FET but based on both the schematic for the NS-2 and other mods to more traditional ones it seems to come off Q2.

In this instance there is a little info on people modding the MXR similarly, which is the muffler board inspiration. But because of the way search engines are nowadays the older info is scarce and often leads to an inevitable 404 from a long gone site.

All that said I intend to use a probe/ alligator clips to see how to make it happen safely. Just wanted to have this here in case anyone had any undocumented info