A bit of buzz about Brian May lately on TGP...

[Skreddy]

So I just thought I'd share a concept which might help anyone trying to get some Queen violin tones without the homemade guitar, Burns pickups, treble booster, and cranked AC30 (or Deacy) amp. 

A Big Muff circuit with some smoother type of clipping diodes (like multiple in-line diodes, maybe a mixture of silicon, LED, mosfet, etc) and then a tone stack which has a prominent mid hump in the 600Hz band.  I was playing with the eq of my mp3 player today (listening to Dethklok), and the guitar came in loud and proud very much Brian May style when I cranked the 600 band.

In addition to a mid-hump BMP tone stack, also consider using a smaller coupling cap between the tone stack and Q4 (standard of course is .1uf; so try halving that or even /5 or /10 of that) and adding extra filtering to the high end to eliminate the fuzziness (maybe use bigger caps in parallel with the clipping diodes?  If standard is 470pf, then try 560pf?) and maybe reduce the gain just a bit, too (like maybe reduce the neg-feedback resistors to 330k?).

So without further ado, here's an example of a BMP tone stack with a 600Hz hump...

[Bucksears]

Looks like a lot of bass and treble as well, if I'm reading that correctly.
Did you try this already?

[B Tremblay]

Proper shielding will take care of hearing buzz. 

[Skreddy]

Looks like a lot of bass and treble as well, if I'm reading that correctly.
Did you try this already?

No; I haven't tried it yet.  I have a more Gilmour-targeted tone stack on my Top Fuel and Pink Flesh pedals that humps the tone a bit more into the 1k zone.

But the bass and treble, I addressed in other places in post #1.  Also, subtle curves, visually, with the BMP tone stack, do yield distinctly audible results.

Also, after having seen an old 80's video demo from Brian May, a treble-boosting input stage would definitely be on order.  Sticking with the Big Muff Pi model (to give that sustain and distortion he gets from cranking little amps), the negative-feedback-filter cap on the input stage oughta be reduced from 470pf (standard BMP) to 220pf (lets in more highs but still kills noise) or 100pf (would be extremely bright sounding).  You could use a smaller input capacitor (like .047uf) if you like, too.  Bigger input caps tend to help with sustain, though; and you could always tighten up the bass elsewhere.

Anyway, like I said; this is just a concept.  I haven't done this particular thing yet and maybe I won't.  It just struck me that 600Hz is a particularly "Brian May" like frequency to boost.  Perhaps that's the corner frequency of his treble booster, below which his bass is chopped off?

So anyway, here's what that tone stack looks like when you turn the knob to 10 (swept all the way to the treble side):


Now keep in mind this is only the response of the tone stack.  It does not reflect any of the other filtering you'd have going on elsewhere.  You'd probably want to roll off the treble at around 6k, and the BMP circuit has plenty of filtering at every stage to take care of that.