Stinger Clean Drive

[Grubb]

Happy Easter folks! I had some free time on Easter Sunday, so I got out the Six String Stinger board I've been waiting to put together. The build went fairly smoothly, although I need to get more solid core hook-up wire or some pre-tinned stranded, as the stranded I was using was annoying and fiddly. I used diode legs to jumper the LED and CLR spots on the PCB as I prefer to have those on my footswitch breakout board. This was also my first crack at SMD soldering and it went really well. Phew!

This thing sounds FAT! I'm chuffed with it. Really beefs up a single coil and turns my chimey Vox clean tone into a creamier, richer sound. I like what it does to the top end, and the slight grit it adds. It gave me that feeling of wanting to play more, which is always a good thing I really want to try this pedal as a preamp straight into an IR.

Here are the pics you probably scrolled straight down to:


Gah! I forgot to push the OUT wire back across with his buddies.

 

[Grubb]

I really want to try this pedal as a preamp straight into an IR.

This didn't work out as I'd hoped. Too bassy and kinda muffled as a result. Seems like it's been designed to beef up the signal hitting the preamp rather than act as its own preamp. It sounds good when used that way.

 

[Dan0h]

Your design looks awesome! This is a great pedal. Kudos.

 

[Grubb]

Your design looks awesome! This is a great pedal. Kudos.

Thanks Dan

 

[MichaelW]

I've been reading a lot about this circuit, especially the interesting and colorful comments in AionFX's version about the origins of the circuit and Vertex's long history of asshattery. I guess until I started building pedals a few months ago I've been living under a rock. I knew nothing about anything (not a TGP reader, hahah). Your gorgeous build has got me wanting to build one now! Kudo's!

 

[Grubb]

Wow @MichaelW, I had no idea that this was a knock-off. I should have known, I guess. I really like the tone of this pedal. Orman, Nelson and Keen are great names to be associated with the design, so no wonder it sounds good.

Every pedal company is making clones of some sort, I don't reckon a true story would have hurt MM too much. "This is a boost circuit I really like, I have given it minor tweaks, it's not my original circuit, but it sounds great." If it sounds and looks good, I'd still buy that pedal.

 

[Fingolfen]

I'd read about one of these before... I may have to pick one up just to see how it sounds...

 

[Grubb]

This didn't work out as I'd hoped. Too bassy and kinda muffled as a result. Seems like it's been designed to beef up the signal hitting the preamp rather than act as its own preamp. It sounds good when used that way.

So I've found that the Stinger has only been useful in specific circumstances, often needing the Tone control maxed to sound good. In trying to investigate why and to find some potential improvement mods, I've been doing some tone-stack calculations. Here is the tone curve with the Six String Stinger values:



Here's the graph of the curve with the tone control capacitors swapped over, as in the Aion Delta-Amp schematic:


That mid-hump looks a lot happier to me, so I'm going to swap the caps over in my Stinger and see if that translates to a real-world improvement in verstality and usefulness. I may even do some before/after clips for reference.

 

[Grubb]

I swapped the tonestack caps over in my Stinger today and I'm happy with the result. The tone control is now more subtle than most, with CCW giving a slight bass boost and treble cut, and the opposite when rotated CW. It could possibly have a stronger effect, but I much prefer the overall tone of the pedal with C11 and C12 swapped over.

I did a quick before and after comparison clip with my basic re-amping setup: Stinger Reamp - capacitor test

Clip 1: Clean tone - Deluxe Reverb patch on my Atomic Amplifire, with a touch of reverb, into a Yorke Audio Fender Deluxe IR
Clip 2: Stinger in front of the Deluxe patch, Steel String Stinger capacitor values, all knobs at 12 o'clock
Clip 3: Stinger in front of the Deluxe patch, Delta Amp capacitor values, all knobs at 12 o'clock

Edit: With the capacitor swap and some chorus, I was getting More Than a Feeling intro tones