Friedman BE-OD Pedal [speculation thread]

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J0K3RX
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Post by J0K3RX »

Ice-9 wrote:First vid reminded me of Randy Rhoads' sound 8)
Yeah, it has a better Jose' sound than most of the Jose' modded Marshalls clones I have heard! And a hell of a lot cheaper @~$199.00.. I might have pawn my ol lady's N Sync memorabilia/collection and get me one of these! :twisted:

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Post by lead2203 »

J0K3RX wrote:
Ice-9 wrote:First vid reminded me of Randy Rhoads' sound 8)
Yeah, it has a better Jose' sound than most of the Jose' modded Marshalls clones I have heard! And a hell of a lot cheaper @~$199.00.. I might have pawn my ol lady's N Sync memorabilia/collection and get me one of these! :twisted:
I have heard it's made and designed by a Chinese company. Remember, it's going into one of his amps. All of which are Jose varents, so that's what I would expect it to end up sounding like in his own clips. I do wonder what it would sound like into a stock Marshall. I would be more interested in the Fortin pedal, that thing seems to sounds good through any amp.

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Post by J0K3RX »

lead2203 wrote:
J0K3RX wrote:
Ice-9 wrote:First vid reminded me of Randy Rhoads' sound 8)
Yeah, it has a better Jose' sound than most of the Jose' modded Marshalls clones I have heard! And a hell of a lot cheaper @~$199.00.. I might have pawn my ol lady's N Sync memorabilia/collection and get me one of these! :twisted:
Remember, it's going into one of his amps. All of which are Jose varents, so that's what I would expect it to end up sounding like in his own clips. I do wonder what it would sound like into a stock Marshall. I would be more interested in the Fortin pedal, that thing seems to sounds good through any amp.
You have a valid point... But, the clean channel is pretty dumbed down compared to the high gain channel. But yeah, I wanna hear it kickin another amp besides a Friedman.. Maybe into a Torpedo then into a DAW

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Post by mlp-mx6 »

lead2203 wrote:I have heard it's made and designed by a Chinese company.
Wonder where you heard that. According to the Friedman web site, it's built in the USA.
http://friedmanamplification.com/friedm ... e-od-pedal

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Post by J0K3RX »

mlp-mx6 wrote:
lead2203 wrote:I have heard it's made and designed by a Chinese company.
Wonder where you heard that. According to the Friedman web site, it's built in the USA.
http://friedmanamplification.com/friedm ... e-od-pedal
Yeah, Dave doesn't really strike me as an "outsource to China" kinda guy...

I am really dying to see what's inside this pedal! I have the schem for the BE-100 amp and have been wanting to emulate it using JFET. Friedman, Cameron, Fortin and others.. all similar

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Post by Groovenut »

J0K3RX wrote:
mlp-mx6 wrote:
lead2203 wrote:I have heard it's made and designed by a Chinese company.
Wonder where you heard that. According to the Friedman web site, it's built in the USA.
http://friedmanamplification.com/friedm ... e-od-pedal
Yeah, Dave doesn't really strike me as an "outsource to China" kinda guy...

I am really dying to see what's inside this pedal! I have the schem for the BE-100 amp and have been wanting to emulate it using JFET. Friedman, Cameron, Fortin and others.. all similar
I've heard they are designed and made by the same folks that do B52 (China)

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Post by lead2203 »

J0K3RX wrote:
mlp-mx6 wrote:
lead2203 wrote:I have heard it's made and designed by a Chinese company.
Wonder where you heard that. According to the Friedman web site, it's built in the USA.
http://friedmanamplification.com/friedm ... e-od-pedal
Yeah, Dave doesn't really strike me as an "outsource to China" kinda guy...

I am really dying to see what's inside this pedal! I have the schem for the BE-100 amp and have been wanting to emulate it using JFET. Friedman, Cameron, Fortin and others.. all similar
It's a great pedal. Sounds better then the amp. I'm curious about the circuit also. Cameron has been doing that circuit way before the other guys. He ended up with Jose's shop and did a simplified version of the mod, without all the added input jacks and drilling extra holes in the amp, also adding the bright switches, doing the master a little differently and clipping options and that's what other people copied. Anyway I don't care where it's made in the end. The price isn't bad and it's a great pedal.

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Post by lead2203 »

Groovenut wrote:
J0K3RX wrote:
mlp-mx6 wrote:
lead2203 wrote:I have heard it's made and designed by a Chinese company.
Wonder where you heard that. According to the Friedman web site, it's built in the USA.
http://friedmanamplification.com/friedm ... e-od-pedal
Yeah, Dave doesn't really strike me as an "outsource to China" kinda guy...

I am really dying to see what's inside this pedal! I have the schem for the BE-100 amp and have been wanting to emulate it using JFET. Friedman, Cameron, Fortin and others.. all similar
I've heard they are designed and made by the same folks that do B52 (China)
Yep, that's who owns Friedman now and makes the amps. And I do see Friedman out sourcing. These days it's the only way to be able to stay in business and mass produce a product on a large scale like he has. I just wish he would be a little more up front about it, but if the amps and other products are built good with good quality control. Then cool. The smaller amps are made in China and I think it says it on those amps. I do think the boards of the high end amps are made there also and I think he should be a bit more honest about that. Since he started doing it this way the build quality of his amps have gone up. Again I just think he should be more honest about it...it doesn't seem to be a bad thing for him.

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Post by destro »

I caught a quick peek inside it. Has a gain trimmer. About a dozen of the grey box caps. No goop/smt at least on that side. Resistors and jfets must be on other side, which I didn't have time to get to. My buddy is going to let me take a look at it over labor day. If someone hasn't got it up by then, I'll do my best for ya Jok3r.

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Post by J0K3RX »

Here's a fairly good demo of the pedal NOT going into a Friedman amp...


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Post by MoonWatcher »

Chromaticdeth19XX wrote:The op-amp choice and LED clipping arrangements look very similar to a Marshall Shredmaster. Though the dynamics aren't as subdued as the shredmaster.
This video shows that there is very little control over the gain. The pedal seems to be full bore or slightly less full bore.

The shredmaster would make sense as Friedman follows the designs of Marshalls and modded Marshalls pretty closely. Why not the pedals as well? Don't the Angry Charlie and Suhr Riot suffer from the same behavior of boatloads of gain but an ineffective drive knob?
At first, I thought it couldn't be similar to a Shredmaster, going by the different pot values. But if you figure that the bass pot is the same value, just with the anti-log taper, and that the pedal adds a presence control, I guess it's likely that the tone stack might be just be scaled differently - e.g. double a pot value and halve the capacitor value.

I also thought that maybe it might be a Baxandall-type tone circuit, but it seems weird having anti-log for bass but linear for treble. But who knows?

The big difference is the 1 meg pot for gain/drive - all the Marshall pedals used 100k linear, and it adjusted the gain at both op amp stages. That's the Achilles' heel of the Marshall stuff - not much of a usable gain sweep, well...at least that's what I've heard a lot users say. And yet this bugger uses 1 meg, and suffers from the same thing. I'd think it's probably just altering the negative feedback in IC1A's inverting input to its output, just like Rat/Tubescreamer, what have you. If that's the case, even though there would be sufficient gain with something like a 3k3 resistor for the highpass filter for the inverting input, it seems like it's too tempting for many to not use 2k2 or smaller.

Or maybe there's some kind of pre-gain shaper, like the midboost stage in a Boss MT-2, but it's got a bit of actual gain as well. It makes it impossible to have something with much of a low-gain range, especially with ground-shunted clippers - as soon as the diodes start conducting, that's pretty much it.

I'm curious as to how similar the tight control in this pedal is to the tight control in the Amptweaker pedals. :?:

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Chromaticdeth19XX wrote:Though the dynamics aren't as subdued as the shredmaster...This video shows that there is very little control over the gain. The pedal seems to be full bore or slightly less full bore.
So I went back and listened to the audio in the video more closely, and don't think it's probably much of a Shredmaster variation, despite the limitations of the gain control.

One thing that all of the Marshall pedals seemed to have in common was that they'd sound pretty dull with the gain turned down. That makes sense since they all had passive tone circuits that were post-gain. I guess the contour control in the Shredmaster is a slight exception, but not really.

Anyway, this pedal doesn't suffer from those treble losses at lower gain that the Marshall pedals did - the presence control makes that pretty clear. I think it's probably just a simple post-gain lowpass filter.

Unless I missed it, it seems like the bass and treble controls weren't really adjusted much? Maybe down to 10:00 on the bass, and maybe up to 1:00 on the treble, but mostly both kept around 12:00. With both the Shredmaster and the Guv'nor, the tone controls are pretty subtle through their ranges, due to being passive filters. But other 'metal pedals' seem to have active EQ circuits, which is pretty obvious by the large change with just a small twist of the knob - many of those have a bass range that is useless for anything other than bedroom playing. So it's going to take another video with comprehensive adjustments to all 3 tone controls, to give an idea of what they might be based on, without any tracing of the pedal. But 3 op amps? That's certainly enough for lots of EQ shaping.

The Barber Dirty Bomb dumps the contour control of the Shredmaster, and I hear no indication that this pedal has anything similar to it, either. I think it's also kind of telling that there's no midrange control, but there is both treble and presence? That almost seems more like the Guv'nor's tone circuits, which some have said are like a modified Big Muff. So maybe Muff-style treble and bass are split into their own controls, and then presence just rolls off some high end after it?

I think that the values of the gray-box caps might give some fast ideas, too.

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Post by Chromaticdeth19XX »

I know you will probably think I'm crazy but have you checked out the schematic for the Danelectro Fab Metal? TL072's throughout the gain structure. The EQ is way off and some of the other components but the behavior of the drive knob and base sound is nearly there to my ears in some of the tone knob positions.


I agree with your observations on the tonstack, it sounds familiar, but I can't quite place it.

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Post by MoonWatcher »

Chromaticdeth19XX wrote:I know you will probably think I'm crazy but have you checked out the schematic for the Danelectro Fab Metal?
I know that the Fab Metal is like a simplified version of the Dano Fab Tone, which is like a simplified MT-2. No, I don't think you're crazy - it's that type of pre-gain into the primary gain stage that I'm thinking could be one way that you end up just a shit ton of distortion, even with the knob set to 7:00.
Chromaticdeth19XX wrote:I agree with your observations on the tonstack, it sounds familiar, but I can't quite place it.
The presence circuit just really seems to sound like it's just a simple passive thing. And I can't be sure from the video, but it seems like the treble and bass are also passive hi-cut or low-cut types, too.

...Going by what seems to be the bulk of the visible resistors, the circuit doesn't look very complex. It also seems to have a "common distortion sound." That's not me saying that it sounds bad - it just sounds like something I've heard before, but with some filters adjusted differently.

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Post by Chromaticdeth19XX »

...Like the AMZ Presence and Tone Control mods for the Big Muff Pi. The bands have a mid push but you can mess with the pots to attenuate or boost the lower or upper frequencies, that mid hump is still there though similar to a marshall tonestack. Which would also make sense why they are less useful at doing anything in the high gain circuit here, you dial a sweet spot that doesn't sound like a tin can nor a wet blanket over your speakers and leave it alone as the gain gets cranked up.

The more I listen to it the more it reminds me of my friend's old Zoom Hyper Lead pedal.

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Post by bmxguitarsbmx »

The actual be-100 cleans up with volume. Not many pedals seem to do that.

Pete Thorn's video shows a ton of knob turning. I also wouldn't be surprised if there is a gyrator in there for that resonant bass response:


I'm guessing its similar to the lovepedal superlead.

here's Fred Briggs blog post on the lovepedal superlead (similar to the marshall guv'ner) with scheme :) .
http://revolutiondeux.blogspot.com/2012 ... rlead.html

here's a good demo of the lovepedal. the demo dude rolls his volume back at the end and it cleans up. Tones are similar. Add a gyrator tuned to 100Hz mt-2 style and it might nail it:

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Post by J0K3RX »

It's not a kin to the Shredmaster or Guv'nor, no ground-shunted clippers. The "Tight" control is not like the Tight Metal/Rock, actually looks like it may be useful... :wink: The treble and bass controls are probably the least exciting but seem effective.. The presence control was not what I expected. The SOT-23 series pair diode clipping is different... soon! :wink:

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Post by MoonWatcher »

bmxguitarsbmx wrote:Pete Thorn's video shows a ton of knob turning. I also wouldn't be surprised if there is a gyrator in there for that resonant bass response:
If there's anything active for the bass, it actually sounds kind of fixed. The bass response doesn't seem to completely drop off as the knob is rolled down.

It almost sounds like the pot itself is panning between two different lowpass filters. Treble almost seems to do something similar. Looking at the cap values on the pcb, I don't think the treble and bass are Baxandall, although there are pairs of resistors that would kind of support that.

...And anti-log taper for the bass would explain why it's so subtle through a lot of its sweep, even compared to a linear-taper pot.

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Post by MoonWatcher »

bmxguitarsbmx wrote:here's Fred Briggs blog post on the lovepedal superlead (similar to the marshall guv'ner) with scheme :) .
http://revolutiondeux.blogspot.com/2012 ... rlead.html

here's a good demo of the lovepedal. the demo dude rolls his volume back at the end and it cleans up. Tones are similar. Add a gyrator tuned to 100Hz mt-2 style and it might nail it:
Well, the Superlead cleans up because there's really only two lowpass filters (besides the tone control). The first has a center frequency of 970 hz, and the second has a center frequency of 1k6 hz. You'd have to really cut the tone knob back to kill the top end.

The Superlead sounds a lot buzzier to me - it sounds like a Guv'nor with the tone controls ripped out. Not a bad sound per se, but the Friedman pedal doesn't sound similar to what I think I hear from the derived-from-Marshall pedals.

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Post by MoonWatcher »

J0K3RX wrote:...no ground-shunted clippers.

...The SOT-23 series pair diode clipping is different...
Interesting...

Any chance the diodes are in the negative feedback loop of an op amp stage that's got the signal going thru the inverting input? That's actually pretty similar to hard clipping. The Runoffgroove.com Thunderbird uses something similar for "Marshall phase inverter clipping," according to them. And the 6k8 resistor in series with the diodes of the Marshall Bluesbreaker are what make it sound much more like an OD than a distortion...

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