Sparkleboost - more distortion?

[sirhc]

Hi, I am pretty new to DIY building and recently built the Sparkleboost by Dragonfly. It works great and the volume boost is perfect but it would also be nice to be able to dial in a little more distortion for when using it as a lead boost after the Tonepad rat I built.

Any pointers to what I should look at to mod it a little would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

[tcio]

I'm far from an expert but from my experience sometimes (not always the case though) it is easier to combine pedals or circuits together to accomplish more gain than it is trying to get it out of one somewhat simple circuit that may not have been designed for that specific purpose.

I had this exact situation with the Omega circuit. It sounded so darn good but I just couldn't get the growl and sustain I wanted out of it. When I did finally figure out a way to get it to distort more it then lacked the beautiful tone and dynamics that I liked so much about it. So I started running it into other booster type circuits and found a couple that just nailed what I was looking for.

I thought the Sparkle Boost sounded very nice also. I have recently been playing around with the "Fet Boost" and it works really well for driving other pedals. You might want to throw that in front of the Sparkle Boost (or vice versa) and see what you get

[jayp5150]

The Sparkleboost responds well to adding hard-clipping diodes on the output.

Just put them after the output cap (shunt to ground). Mess around with different combos--I think I stuck with 2 1N914 in series paired with a 1N914 and a 1N34a in series.

The only thing I've noticed is that it can get a bit woofy at higher gains with this, but I settled on something that I liked at med gain settings, so it didn't bother me (I'm kinda set-and-forget when it comes to my tones lol).

Oh, and as mentioned before, cascading 2 of these circuits is pretty decent, too.

[Ben N]

Check: http://www.diystompboxes.com/smfforum/index.php?topic=72244.0