High gain ehx soul food

A forum devoted to mod, tips and suggestions for upgrading and rehousing your VERY CHEAP commercial stompbox to near boutique excellence.
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Jcknowles89
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Post by Jcknowles89 »

Hello all!

First off I am 100% new to pedal building and mods. So please feel free to talk to me like I'm stupid because I am.

Anyways I have an ehx soul food that I absolutely love! It's the only pedal that doesn't make my already full sounding amp (deluxe reverb) sound thin. But I wanted to see if I could somehow mod it to have a ton more gain while keeping the same smoothness and fullness to it? Looking to get something I could get a good metal tone out of. Think JHS angry Charley or wampler pinnacle

I saw a thing on google that said there will be two diodes in the circuit and that if you just added additional diodes to it you could increase the gain. Based on a soul food schematic I can only assume that if that were true I would be looking to add diodes to the D5 and D6 slots. Would this do the trick? Or is there more too it?

Any suggestions would be great!

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FiveseveN
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Post by FiveseveN »

Jcknowles89 wrote:High gain ehx soul food
Getting high gain and distortion is precisely opposite to the intentions of a Klon(e). I's say it would be more practical to build a "metal tone" pedal from scratch, and more educational if you intend to continue building. Otherwise just buy a cheap one.
There are many simple circuits that will get you most of the way there, and you can add others to complement them later on.
Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge. (Charles Darwin)

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idy
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Post by idy »

Exactly what you can't do with a Klon.

Adding diodes will result in a cleaner sound, less distortion, but higher output. Not what you want at all. The usual trick would be to make the gain pot a higher value (bigger reisistor in feedback loop = more gain) but this in not practical with a Klon type because the gain control is a double-gang pot that pans between different paths with different eq as you raise the gain.
You could try putting a booster in front of it.

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Frank_NH
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Post by Frank_NH »

Rather than mod the Klon/Soulfood, try placing a tube screamer downstream of the Soulfood. Set the Soulfood for low gain (9 o'clock) then crank the tube screamer. I like this combination a lot.

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floris
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Post by floris »

If you replace the diodes with ones that have a low threshold voltage, germanium ones or schottky, the amount of distortion will increase with the same input signal. At the same time, the output volume will be decreased.
And vice versa...

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