Hot-Rodded V5 Emulation

[Tom F]

So I have this amp, an older Bugera V5, which I love the sound of. Mind you, this is after I modded the hell out of it, from the speaker and tubes to the circuit board and output transformer, but now it has lovely cleans, a great crunch, and an amazing driven tone. The circuit is like an expanded version of the Epiphone Valve Jr., so I found many of the mods for that were applicable to the V5 as well.

Now that I have this great little hot-rodded amp, I was wondering if I could capture some of its great sound inside a pedal. This is the result:


And here's a vero layout I just finished:


Some of you may notice a resemblance to the Runoffgroove Professor Tweed. That's entirely coincidental, as the amps each schematic is trying to emulate are so similar in design. I will admit that when I noticed this though, I did borrow the idea of the filtering at the end to help imitate speaker response ha ha. The rest is entirely my adaptation of the circuit currently in my personal amp. I decided to put a charge pump in to take the voltage up to 18v, I used fets instead of tubes, and I put in as many of the tweaks I made to the V5 circuit as possible. I even borrowed the boost switch idea from the Wampler Pinnacle to imitate the boost circuit I installed in the amp.

All that's left is to build it and experiment with a few component values to get the exact feel and response I want. As soon as I get a chance, I will verify this, though feel free to post here if you feel inclined to try doing that yourselves. Cheers!

[BetterOffShred]

Looks really cool man.  I have a big pile of stuff to build, but I do love a good amp emulation. Thanks for sharing this :)

[Tom F]

I was about to build this a little while ago, but I noticed and corrected a mistake I had made on the layout. I also realized that the boost probably wouldn't do what I want, so I changed it to essentially bypass the one resistor to let more signal hit the one jfet (which accurately mimics another mod I did to my amp). Hopefully this layout works better: