Good circuits to experiment with / mod?

[jwroper]

After building 30+ clones now from this site i'm pretty confident with what i'm doing now and am finding myself looking at building some 'originals' of my own. I've got a few breadboarded and have experiemented with swapping out resistors for different values and controls etc...

I wondered if anyone could recommend some good circuits to start with that lend themselves particularly to good mods or experimentation? Thanks all!

[alex.s]

I imagine it will depend on your level of electronics knowledge.

If you know your way way around it a bit but are not an expert/engineer I'd say the best circuits for tweaks/mods are the most common for the simple reason that you can find very good circuit analysis and explanations online.

One you have the circuits dissected and explained it is a lot easier to get modifying as you know where to put your hands according to what you want to change.

Alternatively, you can take a simple circuit (ie Fuzz Face and variants, Bazz Fuss etc) and "pimp it by seeing how a buffer stage can change its tone/responsiveness, adding a tone control, additional clipping etc...

[Madferret]

I had a lot of fun playing around with simple circuits like the Lovepedal Woodrow and the Fuzz Face, I started by breadboarding them and then just seeing what happened when I changed certain resistors or caps, or moved the clipping diodes.  I also wired up a few cheapo pots of different values so I could insert them into the circuit and find a fixed resistor value that I liked.  The good thing is that what applies to simple circuits tends to apply to sections of more complex circuits, for example the Woodrow is just a simple gain stage with clipping diodes and the Big Muff is just 4 gain stages cascaded into each other, the clipping diodes in the BMP might be in a different place but in terms of resistor and cap changes the same basic principles apply to both.  Have fun :D

[Madferret]

Oh I forgot to say that since my level of electronic theory knowledge is pretty weak, messing about with these circuits really helped me lean a lot and forced me to look into things that otherwise I'd have never known.

[vick]

http://www.generalguitargadgets.com/richardo/distortion/
http://www.seymourduncan.com/tonefiend/wp-content/uploads/DIY-Club-Project-2.pdf
http://www.kitrae.net/music/big_muff_guts.html

[jwroper]

Thanks all, my electronics knowledge is pretty weak too but its vastly improved in the last few months - the wampler books have demystified a few things for me and i guess just trial and error on the breadboard is the best way to go and learn what sounds good and what doesn't. Maybe I can justify buying that new fender combo I've been after now (for testing purposes of course) :)