MichaelW
Well-known member
- Build Rating
So a while back @Robert released a couple of "discrete" overdrive projects. The "Fingers" and the "Wilhelm Scream".
This was pretty early in my building and I thought "discrete" meant that the pedal knew how to keep a secret.........
I read @jeffwhitfield 's build report of building both of the above pedals and I was inspired so I decided to build the "Fingers" overdrive first.
I had some self inflicted noobie dumbassery involved with that build and it took me two boards to get it working. It was also my first experience with SMD JFets but I don't think I can punt that as an excuse. It was part of the learning process but I wound up with a working "Fingers" and loved it! Very cool drive and I loved it for a low gain sound.
But I never did get around to building the "Wilhelm Scream" for some reason. Until I recently grabbed the board during one of the sales.
Both the Fingers and Wilhelm are discrete in that there are no opamps and the circuit is powered but the constituent parts of what makes up the opamp circuitry. So lots of transistors and such.
Pretty interesting project doing it this way.
If you take a closer look at the schematic for both of these, you can quickly see that the Wilhelm Scream is essentially a straight up Tube Screamer, just without using an opamp. The Fingers on the other hand, looks more like a Timmy derivative to me.
They have some overlap in how they sound but there's also some differences as well. As I mentioned, the Fingers is one of my favorite low to medium gain overdrives. It sounds thicker than a Timmy does to me and it has some really delightful harmonics in the gain structure.
The Wilhelm Scream sounds pretty much like a YATS. There's some "slight" differences when compared to my stock LGSM/TS808 but I find it interesting that so much is made about the opamps in a YATS and here was a pedal with no opamp sounding pretty much the same.....
Both of these pedals are recommended builds if for nothing else than the novelty of a discrete circuit. But they both also sound great!
I recorded a demo comparing the Wilhelm to the Fingers to my LGSM.
And there's an old demo I did of the Fingers in the context of a song (Warning Steely Dan content, click the link at your own risk...
)
I used another of the cool matte pink enclosures from SBP. I wish I had known about these when I built my Strawberry overdrive (Snozzberry), it would have been the perfect color scheme for that pedal!
This was pretty early in my building and I thought "discrete" meant that the pedal knew how to keep a secret.........
I read @jeffwhitfield 's build report of building both of the above pedals and I was inspired so I decided to build the "Fingers" overdrive first.
I had some self inflicted noobie dumbassery involved with that build and it took me two boards to get it working. It was also my first experience with SMD JFets but I don't think I can punt that as an excuse. It was part of the learning process but I wound up with a working "Fingers" and loved it! Very cool drive and I loved it for a low gain sound.
But I never did get around to building the "Wilhelm Scream" for some reason. Until I recently grabbed the board during one of the sales.
Both the Fingers and Wilhelm are discrete in that there are no opamps and the circuit is powered but the constituent parts of what makes up the opamp circuitry. So lots of transistors and such.
Pretty interesting project doing it this way.
If you take a closer look at the schematic for both of these, you can quickly see that the Wilhelm Scream is essentially a straight up Tube Screamer, just without using an opamp. The Fingers on the other hand, looks more like a Timmy derivative to me.
They have some overlap in how they sound but there's also some differences as well. As I mentioned, the Fingers is one of my favorite low to medium gain overdrives. It sounds thicker than a Timmy does to me and it has some really delightful harmonics in the gain structure.
The Wilhelm Scream sounds pretty much like a YATS. There's some "slight" differences when compared to my stock LGSM/TS808 but I find it interesting that so much is made about the opamps in a YATS and here was a pedal with no opamp sounding pretty much the same.....
Both of these pedals are recommended builds if for nothing else than the novelty of a discrete circuit. But they both also sound great!
I recorded a demo comparing the Wilhelm to the Fingers to my LGSM.
And there's an old demo I did of the Fingers in the context of a song (Warning Steely Dan content, click the link at your own risk...
)I used another of the cool matte pink enclosures from SBP. I wish I had known about these when I built my Strawberry overdrive (Snozzberry), it would have been the perfect color scheme for that pedal!
VE !
