Black Ice kind of passive clipping

[Hacken]

So i found something interesting, diodes insted of caps on the tone pot does passive clipping.
does anybody here have any experience with these things? Cuz now all i can think about is push/pull pots and endless possibilities without batteries.

http://www.unofficialwarmoth.com/index. ... 610.0;wap2
http://guitarnuts2.proboards.com/index. ... hread=4787
http://www.stewmac.com/shop/Electronics ... drive.html

Is this any good? is this the final solution? no more pedals?

[culturejam]

Definitely not the "final solution" (and you should be careful with that particular phrase, by the way, as it has a very Holocaust-y ring to it ).

Clipping diodes are going to limit your output at whatever the forward voltage drop of the diodes is, so your guitar output is going to be a lot less. This may or may not be a big deal depending on your pickups. And without adding another pot, you'll have no control over how much clipping is happening; it will always be maxed out.

Or think of it a more practical way: If the Black Ice method really sounded awesome, everybody would use it.

But I encourage you to experiment for yourself and see how you like it. It might be a great fit for what *you* want.

[eatyourguitar]

I always wondered if passive guitar pickups are loud enough to reach 0.7v. i did it on a noise maker I built but it was sketchy with two legs of a 500k>diodes>ground. only worked on the last bit of the pot and wasnt as much distortion as I would have liked. I was using 1n914. I think 1n4001 or 1n4148 is the preferred diode for black ice.

[multi_s]

if you use germanium diode (1n34a for example) the forward voltage is closer to .3 volts. just another flavor to try. will clip more but be quieter overall?

[eatyourguitar]

yeah thats the obvious solution but didn't know if people who use black ice were always using it with EMG's. I only have 4 germanium diodes in stock so I wasn't gonna use them in my experiments.

[multi_s]

passive distortion on active pickups. thinking outside the box.

[eatyourguitar]

Like a fractal inside a fractal outside a box

[multi_s]

the singularity should arrive any minute now.

[hbombgraphics]

Just curious in the stewmac black ice, is their anything else in that cube? Is it just a diode that they threw some epoxy around?

[eatyourguitar]

just a diode that they threw some epoxy around

I'm pretty sure it is

[hbombgraphics]

sweet, I think I have some trays like that at work and a ton of CB1054:

Oh no knobs yet in China by the way, been looking too, so many shops and not sure how my translator is translating the word knob.

[eatyourguitar]

I have an asian in my pocket. I can call him up. He said he knows where to get knobs too. I just dont want to wait a year for him to visit his family.

[hbombgraphics]

Dude if he is in GuangDong province have him throw me the address, I may be able to pull it off for ya.

I can get anything you want molded, met a new plastics supplier but the tooling is pretty expensive and odds are the knobs don't need to be rated at 180 degrees

[eatyourguitar]

I was told that there are shops that are selling knobs already made in bulk. I'll give him a call tomorrow. I'll tell him your in GuangDong province.

[McSpunckle]

I've done this before. BAT42s would work well, as their forward voltages are super low (.25V), and they're cheap.

One neat trick is to put the diodes between your tone cap and ground. That way, you high end gets clipped instead of just turned down. Actually gives a bass a pretty cool "growl". I posted about it on Talkbass once... someone else tried and seemed to dig it.

That said, while it sounds like distortion, I tend to like my distortion to boost just a bit to make up for the compression... you can use a transformer to get some boost from your pickups, but at that point, just use a damn overdrive pedal.