overdrive amps and guitar volume swells

[Usable Thought]

People may not have understood Einstein, but that doesn't mean everyone who goes misunderstood has great ideas.

Or as the Chinese proverb goes (well, allegedly Chinese) - many beautiful women lead unhappy lives, but not all unhappy women are beautiful.

[ThermionicScott]

Well, tried my best but clearly the situation goes wildly beyond control.

Maybe that's what happens when Seacliff Hospital gets free Wi Fi for the inmates.


Activating the Forum Ignore function in 4 ... 3 ... 2 ... 1 ... NOW!!!!

I was just wondering yesterday if he were any relation to Dr Bronner.

I'm always willing to give someone the benefit of the doubt, but insulting the whole group within days is not the way to make friends.

[tedmich]

I don't know, you guys; normally you'd have to pay good money to see that kind of crazy.

like SGM on acid.

+1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

on Juan's IGNORE LIST response!

[nsubulysses]

When I saw the first 10 posts all pop up within a few hours I really thought someone joined the board while on acid

SGM was a legend in his own mind

[John_H]

To the OP.. What would the effect be by adding a resistor in series with the pot? Wouldn't this change the contour?

Ah screw the lot of you.
Dumbest bunch of misfits I've ever had the misfortune to "think" were intellectuals

It seems that we have a slight distraction here. It's hilariously ironic that he called everyone misfits... Maybe he got ahold of some Nuvigil.

https://www.thrillist.com/vice/i-spe...from-limitless

[Enzo]

Dr. Bronner? He of the peppermint soap? The bigger the bottle, the more there is to read. By the time you read the whole quart bottle, your bath water is cold.

[Leo_Gnardo]

Dr. Bronner? He of the peppermint soap? The bigger the bottle, the more there is to read. By the time you read the whole quart bottle, your bath water is cold.

Yep, that's the one. The Doc had, shall we say, a checkered past. And apparently couldn't stop typing once he got started, a popular problem this week... and he was blind besides. But his liquid soaps are all pretty darn good! I used to wash out a certain rock star's talk box hose with the peppermint stuff, even got a good comment from him on it during one concert. Also recommended for a shampoo & shower on hot summer days, it'll leave you feeling 30 degrees cooler. It's organic, fair-trade, and contains fashionable hemp oil, so you can be an up to date hipster in multiple dimensions.

Now how far away are we from overdrive circuits? . . . What the heck, everything's showing up on this thread, here comes the kitchen sink.

[gui_tarzan]

*munching on popcorn*

[R.G.]

Back at the OP...

If you think about it from a waveforms standpoint, an amplifier without distortion could amplify any input signal, no matter how big, without changing anything except its size. Such amps only exist in our imaginations, as all amplifiers have some limits where their outputs simply can't get any bigger. Put in a signal that tries to force the amplifier output to get bigger, and instead it starts flattening off in some way - it just can't get any bigger.

The "over" part of "overdrive" is what this refers to. A stage is overdriven when it is presented an input that is too big for it to amplify cleanly. The collective we has developed a fondness for some kinds of overdrive, but we deride other kinds as ugly, harsh, and nasty. The difference between good and bad overdrive seems to be all balled up in exactly HOW the sound converts from clean into distorted. If it's sudden and abrupt, as with opamps and high-feedback solid state amps, we all seem to heave a collective "gag me with a spoon". The much vaunted virtues of tube amps seem to be that they can be coaxed into going into overdriven distortion in a smoother, less abrupt way.

Stay with me, I'm getting there.

If you feed any amplifier a big enough input, you get square waves out, or as close to square waves as that particular amplifier can make. So the much-desired touch sensitivity and "cleans up with the guitar volume control" lies, at its root, in how softly nuanced the changeover from essentially undistorted to fully clipped the amplifier can do. If you will, it's how abrupt or un-abrupt the transition is between clean and as over-blasted as it can get. If this is a nice, long, slow transition, you get good write-ups at the amp forums for how sensitive your amp is. If it's razor-edged sudden, people bad-mouth you for it.

So yeah - there may be a critical place for the transition into distortion. It's not surprising. How to make that nice changeover region easier to get into and stay is a lot of the art in amp design.

IMHO.

[Chuck H]

...

[Justin Thomas]

http://youtube.com/#/watch?v=MKDeiMD9a7w

Justin

[The Dude]

http://youtube.com/#/watch?v=MKDeiMD9a7w

Justin

Bad link?

[Justin Thomas]

I'll try one more time...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKDeiMD9a7w

If that doesn't work, dang... Sorry! Youtube search "settle down Beavis" - all I have to say about the frantic nature as of late...

Justin