So having spent quite a few hours with this pedal trying to work out what I had done wrong, or what had happed to the components in this pedal I found a simple fix!

After 1/2 hour the pedal would stop working above the 12 O’Clock position on the DIST which I though had happed because I’d pushed it too far. I grabbed a monocular and flipped it around to inspect the solder joins (Effectively like using a microscope) and couldn’t really see anything wrong.

I compared the DS-1 Made in Japan Layout with the Made in Taiwan model and then I saw the culprit. I had bridged a capacitor while soldering that was causing the pedal to fail the way it was.

Once I desoldered the capacitor the pedal working for longer than 1/2 hour and there was no change in the quality of the sound.

Strangely I had just received the main components for my Greg Fryer Treble Booster Deluxe I was going to make so it was a great lesson/reminder in being accurate and careful about soldering components and making mods to pedals.

So after spending a little time getting the looping correct through my Line6 UX2 USB sound card interface thingy, I tested each of Overdrive/Distortion pedal to see what they did to a 440Hz Sine wave.

Testing required the input volume of the line in component to be shifted up or down depending on the pedal. Changes were in the range of about 25% up or down.

Each pedal was tested with the Tone control (Or Equivalent) at the 12 O’Clock position and the Level or Volume out at 100%.

Each pedal was tested at 50% (12 O’Clock position), 75% (3 O’Clock position) and 100% (Full up Dist/Overdrive position)

Made in Taiwan Boss DS1 (Modified but unreliable – Favourite sound):

• DIST – FULL
• TONE – 12 O’Clock
• LEVEL – FULL

• DIST – 3 O’Clock
• TONE – 12 O’Clock
• LEVEL – FULL

• DIST – 12 O’Clock
• TONE – 12 O’Clock
• LEVEL – FULL

Made in Japan DS-1 (Original – Not modified)

• DIST – FULL
• TONE – 12 O’Clock
• LEVEL – FULL

• DIST – 3 O’Clock
• TONE – 12 O’Clock
• LEVEL – FULL

• DIST – 12 O’Clock
• TONE – 12 O’Clock
• LEVEL – FULL

Made in Japan OD-2 (Original – Not modified)

• DRIVE – FULL
• TONE – 12 O’Clock
• LEVEL – FULL
• TURBO ON

• DRIVE – 3 O’Clock
• TONE – 12 O’Clock
• LEVEL – FULL
• TURBO ON

• DRIVE – 12 O’Clock
• TONE – 12 O’Clock
• LEVEL – FULL
• TURBO ON

Ibanez PDS1 (Modified – Dist level increased)

• DIST – 99
• ATTK – 50
• PUNCH – 50
• EDGE – 50
• LEVEL – 99

• DIST – 75
• ATTK – 50
• PUNCH – 50
• EDGE – 50
• LEVEL – 99

• DIST – 50
• ATTK – 50
• PUNCH – 50
• EDGE – 50
• LEVEL – 99

Morrison Audio Equipment – Tube Squealer – (Not Modded)

• DRIVE – FULL
• TONE – 12 O’Clock
• LEVEL – FULL

• DRIVE – 3 O’Clock
• TONE – 12 O’Clock
• LEVEL – FULL

• DRIVE – 12 O’Clock
• TONE – 12 O’Clock
• LEVEL – FULL

NOTES:

Interestingly the OD-2 has the closest visual form to the DS-1 (Modded) pedal that I like the most with use of my 0.5 Watt amps:

DS1

The waveform is extended and not as peaked as the OD-2 (Volume variation excluded).

Without having run these tests I wouldn’t have guessed why each sound was different. I can hear a difference but saying how is super hard.

These tests gave me a way to analyse and gain (Pardon the pun) an understanding of what’s going on in each pedal.

Distortion Analysis

So I had been wanting to build a Deacy amp (Brian May’s little portable Amp) for a while out of an old PA speaker I found at the local tip shop and I finally got around to it by adding a small 0.5 watt Amp module on the inside. I built it up and played with it and put it away for a year or so.

When I started researching how Brian May’s guitar was built with his Father I started to become interested in the Deacy amp he used and the tones he gets from it. I tried to build a small Treble Booster which failed due to using the incorrect Transistor, so I thought that I might try out the distortion pedals I had just to see what I could get out of my little amp.

I found the old Boss DS-1 Pedal I had and it sounded pretty good. With some tweaking I found that it had the best sound out of all the pedals I own, including a Made in Japan DS-1.

While playing around with the Boss DS-1 (Made in Taiwan) pedal I found it stopped working after a period of time, so I popped it open to see why.

I can’t remember where I bought it from and if I had modded it, but after looking on the inside I realised I had done some mods with a few Resistors and the D5 and D4 Diodes had really odd soldering.

……… anyway, to cut a long story short I realised the DS-1 Modded pedal was my favourite but I couldn’t tell why. The other DS-1 I had sounds similar but not the way I liked on the unreliable DS-1.

While researching about custom pedals and how to mod DS-1’s I found a site that explained what Overdrive and Distortion means in reference to a Sine wave. I saw they used Audacity for looking closer at the Sine wave and I though “Hey ! I have Audacity, I could create a sine wave then loop it into each pedal with various settings and look at the wave form” I’d never thought about doing it that way. I assumed you’d need some kind of Whizz bang Oscilloscope and a history of sound wave knowledge to understand what’s going on.

I did a test with the Modded DS-1 before it started shutting down and got the following result:

This is the Sine wave below generated in Audacity (440 Hz with a 0.8 Amplitude) It’s this signal that was fed into the input of my pedals:

Interesting !, a visual representation of my pedal and what it was doing and a way to compare signals from all my pedals to “See” what they are doing. This will prove very valuable in the future as I create the Treble Booster’s I am hoping to use with my little portable amps.