Continuing coverage of Tube Screamer like pedals – I’ll cover a sort of a Boss Super Overdrive clone. I’ll be covering MXR’s Zakk Wylde overdrive (ZW44).
This post continues building on previous posts: breadboarding the pedal, how it shapes the tone and I even did an alternative version. I have already covered SD-1 too.
I’ll cover quickly the schematic, and then do a quick analysis of it – in comparison to the TS808 & SD-1 circuit. I’ll crack open the pedal and see what’s hidden inside. I’ll pay with the pedal and we’ll see how that goes. If you don’t want to read, just skip to the video.
Btw, I threw in SPICE circuit in there if you want to play with it yourself.
Schematic
Let’s have a look at the schematic:
I marked all components to match what I have on TS808 circuit in one of the earlier posts (I did a similar thing for SD-1). Designators are offset by 300, so R301 on the schematic here corresponds to R1 on TS808 schematic (or R401 on SD-1 schematic), C311 corresponds to C11 and so on.
SD-1 and ZW44 are very very similar. Again, some of the components have different values, but really a handful only. Outside input buffer, I pointed out in the video, just a difference in 3 capacitors.
Analysis
OK, let’s get into details here. I’ve annotated the schematic as in some earlier posts:
You’ll notice that there’s a lot of highlighted elements in red indicating that they might be affecting the sound. I also added a little warning sign onto the ones that are different from TS808. There’s a yellow warning sign with green matching sign when there’s difference between ZW44 and TS808, but no difference between ZW44 and SD-1. Single warning sign means – different from both TS808 and SD-1.
For example, 720Hz high pass filter in clipping section affects the sound but has exactly the same cut-off frequency as TS808/SD-1. On the other hand, ZW44 and SD-1 have much more gain than TS808 in the clipping section.
Let’s zoom in a bit.
Clipping Section
Let’s look into the clipping section.
In the post about what does it mean to be a Tube Screamer, I covered this section in more detail. Looking at this, the only difference from SD-1 circuit is added C304 capacitor. For the most of the rotation of the gain pot, that should not affect the sound though.
One thing to note though is the taper of the (over)drive/gain pot. SD-1 has linear pot, TS808 has log pot but ZW44 has D taper originally. D taper is sort of a log pot but slowly rising resistance part is longer than “normal” A taper log pot. Should not affect sound, but rather “controllability” of the gain.
Tone Section
Tone section differences look like this:
The tone sections look nearly identical between SD-1 and ZW44. The only differences are in C305 & C306 values.
Again, seemingly big differences in cut-off frequencies of filters due to component values, but again, there is a very big proportion of tone pot rotation that gives nearly identical sound on both pedals.
Tone Section Frequency Response
What I said earlier, let’s look into the frequency response of the tone section and compare SD-1 and ZW44.
OK, when you move the slider to the right you reveal SD-1 tone section response, when you move to the left you reveal ZW44 tone section response. If you look closely, huge part of the sweep overlaps (about 60% of the pot rotation).
This is why the pedals when compared, sound quite similar for many knob positions.
SPICE
Here’s the SPICE file if you wish to play with it yourself:
Hidden Secret
There are few videos out there showing how to mod this pedal. This is my take anyway.
There’s a hidden switch inside the pedal. What the switch does is flips between GT-OD and ZW44 modes. Googling some, looks like MXR Classic Overdrive is the same as GT-OD.
I don’t know if that switch is still there on the new GT-OD pedals. My pedal has date 02-08-2006 printed on the PCB, and CUSTOM OD, ZW-44 and CSP-021 (with some numbers following them).
In the video, you can see how I desoldered the switch, replaced it with a toggle switch and screwed it onto the enclosure. Here’s the final result:
I don’t recommend doing this mod unless you know what you’re doing since you could destroy your pedal. I destroyed the original switch in the process. You’ve been warned.
Trying it Out
Finally, let’s try this out:
Sounds good, and I think I did surprisingly neat job of it 😁. Let’s move on to designing our own version of Tube Screamer – yay!!!