Birdie sanders eyes my little clipping diode toolset suspiciously. The weather is nice, so I’m in the yard with the birds and the squirrels ( raccoons and possums too) doing another round of pedals.
One of the features that you find in many pedals is a clipping stage consisting of diodes.
Different diodes have different forward voltages, so you can customize the clipping pattern. The lower the forward voltage, the more it squares it out. You can put em in series, or parallel or even throw resistors in that network. All fun stuff.
Swapping them in and out on a protoboard gets messy though. To facilitate experimentation, I created a set of protoboard plugins to make things easier to try things out.
I have: Left to Right
Si ( Silicon) Ge ( germanium )
- Ge 1n34a
- Ge ?? ( from dads garage…unmarked…but Ge)
- Asymmetrical Red LED + Ge diode
- Si 1n4148
- Si 1n4148 Asymmetrical
- Si 1n4148 x2
- Led red
- Led yellow
- Led green
All have different forward voltages and can be mixed for sounds between teeth grinding crunchy and teeth aching gritty. Keeps the raccoons at bay.
Apparently IR Leds have a lower Vf that “red”. That might be that just right place…gonna have to chase that whale another day.