Special K Distortion mods

[Toastman]

Hello everyone, I recently build a Special Cracker, sounds cool, but it's quite "flat sounding", like in a good way.
But I like more brighter/mid humpy pedals, so I want to experiment with this circuit since it isn't that difficult, but my electro knowledge is quite limited...

Could someone help me with explaing what each part does? Or what could I change to achieve this?

The easiest way I suppose is swapping the input and output capacitor...

 

[Feral Feline]

There's not much to the circuit.

I'm not the guy that you want doling out advice for your endeavour, but nonetheless here I is:

Breadboard it and try the following:

REDUCE C4 — it's 100µ so try 50µ or even 25µ
REDUCE C7 — Stock 10n, so try 6n8 or even get rid of the cap and tone-pot altogether.

I'd also play with C3 and C5. Each is 82n, but together in series they become 41n

JUMPER C5, see what happens. Logically it should actually give you more bass and mids, since you'll have but one coupler of 82n.
REVERSE THAT, try jumpering C3 instead of C5. Will that change anything from having the latter jumpered?

I don't understand the logic of having the two 82n couplers.



The more I thinkerbootit, C4 should be the key to your conundrum. All the other caps IN/OUT/COUPLERS seem very small to me — but then I'm a bass player.

 

[jwin615]

10n input is going to restrict a fair amount of lowend.
Tone sweep is ~159hz to 1.5k.
Should work on filtering lowend.
Agree with FF, futzing with the MORE/C4 is about it, but I'm not sure you'll get it to bee much more mid forward.

 

[Aleph Null]

If you want to push mids before clipping, you need to reduce bass and treble gain.

You could reduce C4, this well raise the cutoff frequency for the gain. That is, it will have proportionally less bass as you turn up the More control. 100nF gives you a cutoff of 160Hz which will tighten things up. 22nF puts you in Rat territory around 700Hz. I'd test between those values.

The next step is to attenuate treble. I'd try putting a cap in parallel with R3. I'd start with 2.2nF and go from there. You could also try a cap to ground in parallel with the clipping diodes. I'd start at 10nF and adjust to taste.

 

[Toastman]

Thank you very much guys I'll try it