help for making a switch to have soft /hard clipping diode

Started by arkham, December 04, 2021, 02:36:46 AM

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arkham

hi all

i try to modif a big muff, i want to put on  a lot of diode on a rotary switch

but i don t know how  to mak a switch on/on, to make a soft clipping diode and pass to hard clipping diode

can you help me ?

regards

nocentelli

You might have to explain exactly what you mean by hard and soft clipping in the context of a BMP circuit.

It is often understood that "hard" clipping involves a pair of diodes from the audio path to ground (like in a Rat or Dist+) whilst "soft" clipping places the diodes in the feedback loop of an opamp, like a tubescreamer. By this definition I suppose a BMP is "soft" clipping" type circuit, but it has two clipping stages so you would need more poles on any switch to flip both at once.

In other situations, the "hardness" of clipping can mean how quickly the diodes clip as the signal level increases, and how abrupt this change is, e.g. low vf germanium diodes versus blue or white LEDs - this would be slightly easier to implement with a single switch for both stages: Or you might want a switch for each stage?
Quote from: kayceesqueeze on the back and never open it up again

arkham

in fact i want to put a rotary switch like that in a big muff



and have a switch on/on to pass to soft clipping to hard clipping like that

zesak

If you want to go all out, i would put one single pole rotary in opamp feedback and one after opamp output.
What you are showing is a dual pole switch. Pole A connects to positions 1-6 and pole B to 7-12.
Using two separate single pole switches, one for soft and one for hard clipping, you will get lot more possible combinations.
Simply unsolder the diodes, and connect A to one side where the diodes on pcb used to be before unsoldering them,
and connect the common side (marked ground) to the other side on pcb where the diodes used to be.
It really doesn't matter which end of the switch goes where, meaning you can connect A to the opamp output and "ground" to the - opamp input or the other way around. Same for hard clipping section.