DEMO Virgil Overdrive (Digitech Bad Monkey)
- Thread starter MichaelW
- Start date
This post contains an audio or video demo
MichaelW
Well-known member
I got them from SBP, and they work in my other pedals.Do they have this code? lot of fakes out of China!
Edit: They're still in the gut shot, code is B102A
MichaelW
Well-known member
Yah, I don't get it, why it would do this.This is a very important detail that was missing!
Now that is Weird!
coltonius
Well-known member
There are few things I'll buy from them consistently.. The aluminum knobs, the Gorva footswitches, Lumberg jacks, and a few other "name brand" things are all top notch. There's a loooot of actual junk for sale though.
MichaelW
Well-known member
That's about all I get from them is my small stash of "emergency" Lumberg jacks.......for those "Oh sh*t I didn't measure right" moments......There are few things I'll buy from them consistently.. The aluminum knobs, the Gorva footswitches, Lumberg jacks, and a few other "name brand" things are all top notch. There's a loooot of actual junk for sale though.
aetguitars
Member
Looks great!So I guess I missed all the controversy as of late for this pedal involving JHS. I'm not exactly sure what the controversy was and too lazy to look into it too much (and really don't care....
But out of curiosity I built the pedal and tbh I think it sounds great!
You could say it's a YATS with a Bandaxall tone stack and wouldn't be too far off but the eq is pretty powerful and can pull some of the mids out.
It reminds me a bit of the Boss OD-1 (Oddity) but with more eq control and more bass. It can be pretty "big" sounding.
But I found that my favorite sound was with the gain turned all the way down in a semi-clean mode on the neck pickup of a strat. So that's mostly what's in my demo.
I did have a very puzzling problem with the build. I built it according to the BOM txt with the JRC4580's but when I first fired it up the gain knob did nothing.
Everything else worked, volume and the tone controls but the gain knob did nothing.
After cursing (because I had already boxed it after checking voltages) I pinged @Robert. He had me measure a couple of things then said "throw a 4558 in and see if it makes any difference". So I did and BAM everything worked!
My first thought was I must have either a) goofed the install of the IC's, or b) had a bad IC. So I pulled two fresh 4580's and put them in carefully. Same problem, no gain. Put the 4558's back in and BAM it works again.
So I have NO clue what's going on but I left the 4558's in it and calling it good.
This "should" be the last of my crappy enclosures. I can't remember where I got them from, maybe LMS? But the powder coat wasn't done very well.
But I decided to use it.
The red chicken head knobs I got at the recent knob sale from AES. First time I've seen "bright red" chicken heads.
Other than the aforementioned issue with the Opamps, the build was smooth and easy.
View attachment 48282
View attachment 48283
This demo is the first appearance of my re-built Red Strat with the Lollar 64's in it. (Special S in the bridge).
It doesn't sound a lot different than it did with the old neck and body but it sure plays a lot better. Absolutely love it!
Also LOVE them Wudtone tremolo....thanks for the tip @SillyOctpuss!
Also, using my VHT amp with the new tubes in I post about here. Boy they sound good. And they're squeaky new, can't wait for them to get some hours on them and break in a bit.
Where did you find the BOM.txt?
MichaelW
Well-known member
I just built it off the values silkscreened on the pcb.
aetguitars
Member
I had the exact same issue with the 4580 op amp.So I guess I missed all the controversy as of late for this pedal involving JHS. I'm not exactly sure what the controversy was and too lazy to look into it too much (and really don't care....
But out of curiosity I built the pedal and tbh I think it sounds great!
You could say it's a YATS with a Bandaxall tone stack and wouldn't be too far off but the eq is pretty powerful and can pull some of the mids out.
It reminds me a bit of the Boss OD-1 (Oddity) but with more eq control and more bass. It can be pretty "big" sounding.
But I found that my favorite sound was with the gain turned all the way down in a semi-clean mode on the neck pickup of a strat. So that's mostly what's in my demo.
I did have a very puzzling problem with the build. I built it according to the BOM txt with the JRC4580's but when I first fired it up the gain knob did nothing.
Everything else worked, volume and the tone controls but the gain knob did nothing.
After cursing (because I had already boxed it after checking voltages) I pinged @Robert. He had me measure a couple of things then said "throw a 4558 in and see if it makes any difference". So I did and BAM everything worked!
My first thought was I must have either a) goofed the install of the IC's, or b) had a bad IC. So I pulled two fresh 4580's and put them in carefully. Same problem, no gain. Put the 4558's back in and BAM it works again.
So I have NO clue what's going on but I left the 4558's in it and calling it good.
This "should" be the last of my crappy enclosures. I can't remember where I got them from, maybe LMS? But the powder coat wasn't done very well.
But I decided to use it.
The red chicken head knobs I got at the recent knob sale from AES. First time I've seen "bright red" chicken heads.
Other than the aforementioned issue with the Opamps, the build was smooth and easy.
View attachment 48282
View attachment 48283
This demo is the first appearance of my re-built Red Strat with the Lollar 64's in it. (Special S in the bridge).
It doesn't sound a lot different than it did with the old neck and body but it sure plays a lot better. Absolutely love it!
Also LOVE them Wudtone tremolo....thanks for the tip @SillyOctpuss!
Also, using my VHT amp with the new tubes in I post about here. Boy they sound good. And they're squeaky new, can't wait for them to get some hours on them and break in a bit.
MichaelW
Well-known member
I never did figure this out, but using the 4558's sounds great so I'm not sweating it.I had the exact same issue with the 4580 op amp.
This has become one of my favorite overdrives. Hasn't left my signal chain since I built it.Thanks for posting this. I built one and I wasn’t really a fan…actually thought I messed the build up somehow but your video shows me that that’s just the nature of the pedal - relative low volume, last bit of the throw on the treble has a huge impact, bass gets super flubby up high. I ended up experimenting with op amps and ended up with TL072’s which I convinced myself had a tighter clipping character to them. But the major things I did were swap one of the diodes with a schottky (forget which one exactly) and altogether removed transistor Q2, which acts on the bass tone control and swapped Q3 to a higher gain npn transistor for some more volume. Now the bass control acts almost like a second gain knob, which is pretty cool. Net result is a much louder, crisper pedal, which I think is pretty cool.
Great playing btw.
Great playing btw.
Bricksnbeatles
Member known well
I saw this about another bad monkey PCB today, but it says that the transistor in the bass control (q2) is backwards, and that fixing it makes the bass control work properly. Someone mentioned that the same is the case for the Virgil here, though it doesn’t appear that way in the schematic that I just looked at (perhaps it’s been fixed? I don’t have a copy of the original Virgil schematic)— might be worth flipping q2 to see if it fixes the bass-as-a-second-level-control issue.
MichaelW
Well-known member
Did yours work with two 4580's? I don't think anyone figured that out. I wonder if it has anything to do with Q2?
Bricksnbeatles
Member known well
Looks good I believe. I think the erroneous schematic has the emitter of q2 connected to VCC and the collector connected to r14/15. Don’t know which schematic the person in the thread was looking at, but they claimed it had the same error. Might be worth doing a quick continuity check to see which way it’s oriented on the board. If the errror is there, it might also explain the opamp issue as well that requires a 4558 in place of one of the 4580s.
I couldn’t actually locate any 4580’s, so I went with 4558. I’ll try flipping Q2.
MichaelW
Well-known member
Lemme know how it turns out. I was definitely digging the pedal for a while. It had a certain charm about it that I liked. It can function as a standalone drive or as a Klon/TS alternative to boost an amp. But I kinda grew tired of it's "narrow-ness" after a while and it got rotated out.
So someone smarter than me would have known this without even trying it, but flipping Q2 around makes it act like it’s not even there. I ended up putting Q2 back in…decided it does actually help control the bass in a usable way.
