Is there a Tone Stack Calculator for Gain stages?

[Dan0h]

I have finally gotten around to playing with the Tone Stack Calculator 1.4 app. Very cool tool that lets you see the EQ response curve of changing resistors and caps in a tone stack. I was wondering if there was an equivalent app that lets you do this for Gain/volume stages? I finally have my bread boards set up and am in the first stages of experimenting using the pile of extra components I have laying around. My goal is to try to combine my favorite parts of several pedals into a single pedal with tweaks just for fun.

Thanks dudes.

 

[temol]

This and much more - ltspice.

 

[phi1]

Agreed LT spice is a great tool to visualize. However I often take a quicker approach when comparing circuits or understanding why they sound.

in many cases the gain and tone stages contain single pole high pass and low pass filters, based on a resistor and capacitor. There’s a few common ways these are implemented that start to become easily recognizable. In most case the cutoff frequency of these filters can all be calculated with the same simple formula (regardless of high pass or low pass).

Fc = 1/(2*pi*R*C)

I use an iPhone app called ee calculator to calculate this formula quickly, there’s a bunch of apps like that.

rather than describe the ways these RC filters are implemented I’ll point you to electrosmash articles for tube screamer and rat. They’re dense, have to read through several times. But it forms a great basis for understanding dirt circuits.