Electra Distortion 500D/600D schematic

jessenator

jessenator

Well-known member
Does anyone happen to have the schematic for this?

I tried, unsuccessfully, to breadboard it, removing the latching bypass switching portion from the trace found at FSB (that friggin pedal went by so many names—SIX) specifically for the Loco Box Mysto Dysto. It's a 500D with a paint job and possibly some value changes.
www.freestompboxes.org

Locobox - Mysto-Dysto Distortion Unit

Drawing error in the switching control part fixed.
www.freestompboxes.org www.freestompboxes.org

The one referenced/mentioned on tagboardeffects post (Electra Distortion 600D) comments section links to mudpods domain, which is no longer live and not on the wayback machine, sadly. Wonder if someone grabbed it before it went offline (many years ago now)
tagboardeffects.blogspot.com

Electra 600D

Collection of vero (stripboard) & tagboard layouts for 100s of popular guitar effects, with over 1000 verified designs. DIY your own boutique effects!
tagboardeffects.blogspot.com tagboardeffects.blogspot.com

I thought about just tracing the vero, since it's free of the 500D's bypass, but I've never done that before.

Thanks for any help.
 
That one's a lil different, at a glance anyway. Tired eyes and limited time on it... What's piqued your interest in it, if you don't mind me asking.
 
jwin615 said:
That one's a lil different, at a glance anyway. Tired eyes and limited time on it... What's piqued your interest in it, if you don't mind me asking.
Click to expand...
A friend for whom I've built several projects was asking about it. He's a big Flaming Lips fan and apparently their guitarist shared something on insta like "are people gonna flip when they find out my guitar tone was just this crappy pedal?" and rummaging through a box pulls out a 500D.

It's small and insignificant, but I think some of the unobtanium properties also contributes. Definitely want to at least breadboard it to hear it in person.

By all accounts it's "just a D+/OD250 with a muff tone stack"

But yeah it's mostly that I'll get something on my head to try and tackle/dissect/experience. Who knows, I may just hate it in the end :p won't know unless I spend too many hours on it :p :p
 
The 600D looks like they added a switch to toggle the clipping, but some values look to have changed. Otherwise it's a 500D.

This thing has gotten under my skin, like the time I traced back the genealogy of the "125B" nomenclature to Circuit Specialists in the late '90s commissioning a Taiwanese clone of the 1590N/1 and it just stuck.

But i think I'm going to emulate the "Nadine" style. IDK why. Nadine gives me Joan Jett vibes for some reason 🤩
 
I've never understood the "125B" thing. The enklonesures copied all the Hammond enclosures including the Hammond designations except for "N1".

It's two characters less-cumbersome and easier to just type or say "N1" than "onetwentyfivebee"...


The schematic Cybercow unearthed from dreddit is... interesting, unconventional.
 
Feral Feline said:
I've never understood the "125B" thing.
Click to expand...

The reason why we still call it "125B"

The reason why we still call it "125B"
www.madbeanpedals.com

It's a running post of thoughts as I went through it all to find the source. Tl;dr is in my other post above: Circuit Specialists commissioned a clone of the 1590N in the late 1990s (didn't have the "1" yet, which was to delineate it from the original ,ribbed version).

I suspect this might've been the reason, but there may be more:

The 4s125B is what most hobby suppliers had on hand, mammoth in particular, and they just must have just parroted the nomenclature from the Circuit Specialists clone and ran with it. Some places might've had OG Hammond boxes, but who just starting out in the hobby space wanted to shell out for those? I don't recall offhand when the Hammond 1590N became the rib-less 1590N1, but that may be irrelevant. I think we were just saturated with the 125B name early on.

By the time it started ramping up, and we got into more sizes, maybe cloners of the hammond standard just gave up the pretense and named them like Hammond did… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯


Yeah, it's afternoon here and I still haven't breadboarded that one yet. Ha. I can procrastinate, I'm on vacation : P
 
@jimilee got me sorted on this on the mbp forum. Thanks again, dude!

Turns out I just didn't know how to properly strip out the entire buffer to make it true bypass.

Kind of anemic on the output stage, so i might put in a switch to go from normal to a a higher output. Friend wants an original one, mostly, but I want the option.

Looking at old posts from effectsdatabase forum, there were some value changes between 500D and 600D. I'll futz around with them on the breadboard to see what I like, but I don't mind the original values for what they are.
 
jessenator said:
Kind of anemic on the output stage, so i might put in a switch to go from normal to a a higher output. Friend wants an original one, mostly, but I want the option.
Click to expand...
One correction to the original trace schematic: the 1M resistor on the output stage should go to ground, not VB. I get no signal on a real amp. For some reason it was working on my mini LM386 based bench amp, and was likely the cause of the low output.

Nice and loud output now. However, the switch might serve another purpose in that bypassing those last few components, and routing pin 1 on LEVEL to ground gives a different tone character. It's almost as if the clipping gets even harder, but it may just be the top end not being filtered out at the end.
PcP9FZQ.png

I need to rename that switch to something other than "boost" since it's not doing that anymore.

a terribly compressed (thanks, camera mic) audio demo showcasing the two different "tones" mentioned. First is original routing, second is the alternate routing. Might not be super apparent, but in person it is. Need to get a mic up here…
https://soundcloud.com/jessenat0r%2F500d-two-outputs-med
 
Last edited:
jessenator said:
One correction to the original trace schematic: the 1M resistor on the output stage should go to ground, not VB. I get no signal on a real amp. For some reason it was working on my mini LM386 based bench amp, and was likely the cause of the low output.

Nice and loud output now. However, the switch might serve another purpose in that bypassing those last few components, and routing pin 1 on LEVEL to ground gives a different tone character. It's almost as if the clipping gets even harder, but it may just be the top end not being filtered out at the end.
PcP9FZQ.png

I need to rename that switch to something other than "boost" since it's not doing that anymore.

a terribly compressed (thanks, camera mic) audio demo showcasing the two different "tones" mentioned. First is original routing, second is the alternate routing. Might not be super apparent, but in person it is. Need to get a mic up here…
www.dropbox.com

500d-two-outputs-med.mp3

Shared with Dropbox
www.dropbox.com www.dropbox.com
Click to expand...
Way to keep trudging ahead.
No access on the Dropbox file btw...
 
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