It’s pretty distorted! Soon, I’ll publish a full explanation of how my pedal works.
Soldering For The Soul
Two-hour soldering exercise yesterday. It’s pretty darn fun. Change my mind.
The final product: bulbs, plus resistors from the previous post—
Regarding Resistor Bands
Great news! I just received a brand-new batch of resistors.
Bad news! I mixed them up, and my multimeter is funky, so I’m left to learn the peculiar skill of reading resistor bands.
I had a go at one yesterday for a short while — around 10 minutes — and I was already confused by which direction to read it. It’s a five-band, so there’s no obvious gap in the middle.
Plus, I had a hard time telling the colours apart. To the extent that I needed my phone’s flashlight. 😭
Forgive my possible ignorance, but why can’t you guys just print the value out?
P.S. I’ve also received a new toolbox. I feel a wee bit more important now.
Bass Fuzz: LTSpice!
It’s been more than a week and we haven’t moved past the Clipping Stage. Oh well.
My dad suggested I use LTSpice — a software that lets you build a circuit and measure its current plus voltage. It’s not very user-friendly (or pretty, for that matter), but it gets the job done.
Like some guy on Reddit had said, the further you go into EE, the uglier programs get.
Bass Fuzz: The Clipper (A Small Part Of It)
Here’s what I’ve been talking about over the recent blog entries: The Clipping Stage!
Disclaimer: It’s still not complete; there’s supposed to be an additional capacitor and diode, but we’re testing the resistors and transistor first.
R1 is the Green Resistor, with a value of 510kΩ. It’s connected to the power source (9V) and the collector of the NPN transistor.
R2 is the Red Resistor, with a value of 1MΩ. It’s connected to the base of the NPN transistor and ground.
And we have the emitter of the NPN transistor, leading straight to ground.
The issue: V3 doesn’t have any voltage going through. We think that it’s either A) the transistor’s fault, or B) the breadboard itself, which might have short-circuited. Either way, it’s bothersome, and progress has been slow during the holidays.
Anyhow, I’ll have to get it done by this year, since I’ll be busy with my exams in the next. Oh boy.
Bass Fuzz: RIP My Transistor
2N3904, you will be missed.
Moving on. I just re-tested the stage from yesterday.
I should REALLY learn how to read the bands. My big brain couldn’t differentiate these resistors:
Going from left to right: R2 and R1. They’re used for the schematic below:
Everything but V3 worked today. Apparently, there’s supposed to be some sort of voltage read there. I got absolutely zilch.
It’s OK. I’ll be trying again soon!
Bass Fuzz: Testing
Here’s my circuit now, for future ref. I might need to move some parts around, because it’s totally not working at the moment.
I spent three and a half hours testing the “clipping” stage of the circuit. There was no current on the oscilloscope at first — turns out we’d used the wrong resistor. I should probably learn to read resistor bands.
Plus, the transistor was funky. Even after we’d identified the collector, base, and emitter.
Thankfully, we found out why. NPN transistors only work at a certain voltage, at 0.7V. Our resistor resisted too much of it, and left 0.3-0.4V. Which was quite odd, since the schematic specifically called for a 510k Ω resistor.