Tim's Rambler

[csmatt45]

Built tim's rambler, very cool. i wanted something more useable than the fulltone/tycho oct. and that's what I got.

if you try it, you can save a lot of frustration that I suffered with a couple of tips:

1) Don't try 4148 diodes instead of his recommended schottkeys, it sounds like an drive-in movie speaker.
2) Ge diodes work great however!

cool thing about the rambler is that it's one of those effects that doesn't instantly sound amazing with your guitar and your amp. But, like many of the pedals that wind up staying on experienced players pedal boards, when you play with a band in rehearsal, or a show, at full volume, you keep coming back to it, and see it's beauty is in it's simplicity.

It's almost like a tubescreamer, a FF and a simple oct up were put in a blender.

anyways, I'm still a "paint by numbers" builder and did want to make one simple tweak that I'm hoping one of you with more exp could tell me.

It has a tremendous amount of output via a 10k pot (tim says on the site that it can drive a cab, so I think it's intensional). I've found that some-where between 10 and 2 o'clock are the about equivalent to an average OD/fuzz volume range. What is the simplest way for me to lessen the output and "spread" the pot's output more evenly.

again, I've built a handfull of FX, but still don't have a grip on all the concepts. Would a resistor in series before it work?

thanks in advance for your help.

Matt 

[Tim Escobedo]

The series resistor would work fine to tame the output of the effect. However if you do this, it probably won't be able to drive a speaker cab. When used as a octave-up power amp, the volume pot pretty much beeds to be cranked all the way up or nearly there.

[csmatt45]

any approximate value for the series resistor (to give it a more "average" output)?

thanks tim...