DOD Fx57 "Hard Rock" Distortion

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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byblossom
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Post by byblossom »

Hello,
Has anybody out there modded the DOD Fx57? I just picked one of these up for very cheap because nobody seems to like them. I have a sort of soft spot for undesirable distortion pedals...and this one has a pretty bad rap, despite a lot of interesting components inside. I thought I might be able to find more mods online, but so far the most I've come up with is in regards to tweaking the trim pots via this post on gearbug.com from 2002:

"ok, this CAN be a pretty fun pedal --with a simple adjustment. This pedal has a true analog delay in it via the MN3002(? been awhile since I've had mine open.) Anyway, open her up, find the 2 trim pots inside near the MN3002 chip, one is probably for delay length and the for regeneration I guess. Just adjust them until you get the the sound you want. I have mine set up to the max length delay sounds pretty crappy! and then at about a 3/4 turn of the "Delay" pot it breaks into self-oscillation, So now it makes a great sound source. If your slightly ambitious it would be cool to bring these trim pots out so you can easily tweak them. After doing this it becomes a pretty useful pedal for what it offers it a compact space... and it's dirt cheap so what the hell."

& another from 2005... "note: if you adjust the internal trimpots you can create a delayed octave effects by maxing the delay knob and moving the (closest to bottom) trimpot untill you hear the lowest frequency of feedback and then (while imputing sound) move the middle trimpot untill you hear a pitch bent synth tone a couple seconds after each sound you put in. with this you can make crazy delayed sounds that can be 3 octave lower and sometimes completely reversed pitches."

modman on this forum did post the schematic in "circuit analysis" back in 2015...
https://www.freestompboxes.org/viewtopic ... 57#p251638

& of course, there is the America's Pedal page on it... http://www.americaspedal.net/fx57/
Okay, I admit that "Hard Rock Distortion" is just about the most un-interesting name for a pedal imaginable....but surely this has some potential?

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Fender3D
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Post by Fender3D »

byblossom wrote:Hello,
...find the 2 trim pots inside near the MN3002 chip, one is probably for delay length and the for regeneration I guess. Just adjust them until you get the the sound you want...
Blissful ignorance....

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byblossom
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Post by byblossom »

Well it was 2002! Also note that the quoted person refers to the chip as MN3002, but as you can see in the picture it is actually the MN3007. I think this pedal is already capable of some good textures, when combined with other balancing factors...but it does leave some things to be desired.

Another interesting (if unforgiving) review here...

http://mirosol.kapsi.fi/2013/09/dod-fx5 ... istortion/

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