Re: Hello and Noisy Cricket Question

Posted by Frank_NH on Sep 16, 2015; 2:23am
URL: http://guitar-fx-layouts.238.s1.nabble.com/Hello-and-Noisy-Cricket-Question-tp24451p24453.html

Welcome!

I haven't built a Noisy Cricket but will probably do so as I think I have a 386 chip around somewhere.

Here is an analysis of the circuit:

http://www.electrosmash.com/noisy-cricket-analysis

And here is the datasheet for the LM386.

www.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/lm386.pdf

Here are some mods I would try (don't know if they would work but hey...)

* For more gain, put a 1uF - 10uF capacitor in series with the 1K gain pot.  Note that the + side of the electro cap should connected to pin 1 of the LM386.  That is put the - side to lug 3 of the Gain pot and the + side to the Gain 3 wire shown on the vero layout.

* The tone control is reportedly pretty lame and I can see why.  It's just a simple low pass filter, but it seems that it would depend a bit upon the volume pot setting.  I would just eliminate it, but if you wanted to experiment then change the 100nF cap to 470nF and put a 1K resistor between Volume 2 and Tone 1 (normally they are just connected with a wire as indicated on the layout).  This would give you a low pass filter with a roll off at about 340 Hz at the minimum pot setting and little or no treble loss at the max pot setting.  Of course, you could get really fancy here (BMP tone control!) but I would probably want some signal boost before or after the tone circuit.

Have fun and let us know if you mod your Noisy Cricket!