billonious wrote:keep in mind that an ultra soft clipping isn't perceived as nice. In our mind, a very-very long soft-knee results in the same amount of (perceived from ears) distortion irregardless of the signal level (or the gain). This is the opposite of what guitar overdrives are expected to do, as we want the chord to get cleaner progressively as time goes away from the initial hit of the string.
When I was testing a tube emulator in breadboard, I noticed that there is a golden section between harsness and softness that is toothsome for the mind. Too soften clipping is nastily dull, but too harden clipping is blurred of harmonics. In my tube emulator, I ended up combining both soft & hard clipping in the same cirquit, but soft clipping to be present in low to medium gain, while hard-clipping to dominate as the gain gets up.
So, don't expect a clipping-fet in opamps' feedback to be magical. You probably won't like too much softness of the sound.
Good point,I mostly did the experimenting just out of curiosity to see if it would actually work,it appears that getting the dynamics right is half the battle when it comes to getting a good sound from clippers,some distortion devices,like early fuzzes,tended to be very abrupt in their dynamics,that is,the onset of clipping happened very quickly,and that had a tendency to blot out the natural sound of the guitar,I think the trick is to get the distortion harmonics to be proportional to the signal amplitude....
If you can also get the symmetry of the clipping to vary in proportion to the signal level,that should go a long way to making the distortion sound more musical to the ears due to the even harmonics....
Genius is not all about 99% perspiration, and 1% inspiration - sometimes the solution is staring you right in the face.-Frequencycentral.
