DS1 to Punk/Ska/Pop-Punk?

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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jammy86
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Joined: 30 May 2017, 10:46

Post by jammy86 »

Hi All,

New face here. I've been starting to learn guitar this year since I never did as a kid and of course the pedal bug has got me... I know I should concentrate on learning to play the thing, but I can't help the engineer within me.

I'm looking for a punk/ska/pop-punk tone. This seems to be characterised in general by Mesa Boogie Tripple Rectifiers by many of the bands who play such music but not all. Orange heads, Telecasters, P90's, LPs are all in the mix too. As a beginner playing in a small room on my own a £1500 head isn't really going to work for me so I'm looking to take the pedal in this direction which seems possible... For reference I'm rocking a Pacifica 112V playing the bridge humbucker.

So I've got a DS1 and as expected it's a little "thin". So I did the fat mod, nice, I like the direction it's going. This weekend I played with an LED (Vf = 1.6) in D4 and hated the sound, far to clean. I swapped this for a JFET diode (Collector to Emitter and reversed) with Vf = 0.75, a little cleaner and mild asymmetry over standard... it's ok, I might just go back to the 4148s. I suspect I've dropped the gain a bit too much with the fat mod so I'm going to tweak that back up a bit and see how I get on.

There are a huge variety of mods out there for the DS1, many of them seems to take it in a cleaner/overdrive direction. I've got an SD1 that I modded to the "Big Yeller" and a TS clone which I've germainiumed up, I like both of these for their own reasons but I'm looking for something more aggressive.

To save me ripping off tracks by my bad soldering (it's not that bad to be fair..) while going through every mod out there can anyone suggest a direction in which to go in pursuit of my quest? It seems sensible to do the basic mods to improve quality but I don't want to order up a bunch of caps and then find out that I needed a different value.

Any advice appreciated :)

Regards,
JAmes.

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poiureza
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Post by poiureza »

If you haven't already, this is a good read : http://www.electrosmash.com/boss-ds1-analysis

My idea of punk tone is harsh distortion so I'd try clipping a leg of C10 and/or C7.

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jammy86
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Post by jammy86 »

poiureza wrote:If you haven't already, this is a good read : http://www.electrosmash.com/boss-ds1-analysis

My idea of punk tone is harsh distortion so I'd try clipping a leg of C10 and/or C7.
Thanks for the link. After some reading I decided that I was lacking gain after the fat mod. I dropped R9 to 100R and it's almost exactly what I'm looking for! Bass is a little heavy with the tone knob below 2/5ths of the way but I'll keep playing with that. I guess for now I'll replace the signal caps and resistors with higher quality ones and take it from there. I'll post up my mods for future reference when I'm done.

Mods so far are:
D4 replaced with a diode of Vf = 0.72V
R9 = 100R
R6 = 150K

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