Toutrankilou, T'as l'oeil
j'avais pas vu :
TECH/MODS SPECS: Starting in December of 2001 I started to toy around with the Blues Driver. What I liked was the amount of gain that the pedal had and the complication they engineered into a fuzz tone pedal. They worked hard to come up with a complex tone. What could I do? Just little things...but, after a while I found that several of my changes were adding up to a wonderful improvement in the tone! Cool! What I do is change many capacitors and resistors to fine tune the sound. I change the input capacitor to allow more of the natural bass from your guitar through. That helps with the weak bass problem. I change the the value of capacitor on the Tone control to make it not so thin sounding when turned up. It evens out the response of the control. I change the value from 0.018uF to 0.033uF, then switch in a 0.068uF cap for the Phat switch. I then change 6 electrolytic capacitors capacitors for increased smoothness and a little higher quality sound. Lastly, the old 2nd order harmonic increase trick!!! I change diodes to make the clipped signal a little more asymmetrical. Guitar players love even ordered harmonics. They sound best!
All-in-all the pedal sounds much better than before. There is a definite increase in the sweetness or saturation of the clipped signal. It has more sustain. It is a lot less fuzzy or cranky sounding and much more tube-like in tone. Best of all with the ceramic caps changed to silver mica, there is a drop in the background noise level. The improvement in tone is unmistakable.
Boss BD-2 Blues Driver Mods
This is not all-inclusive in what can be done to the Blues Driver. It is meant to give an idea of where the tone can be improved or changed. All of the changes are subtle but when packaged together offer a nice improvement.
D3 Change this 1SS133 to a different (1N4002) diode for asymmetrical clipping. This adds second order harmonics. This adds to the tube type sound. I like the sound of this change.
D7 D8 D9 and D10 Change 2 of of these diodes from 1SS133 to a single 1N4002. More second order harmonic distortion. Although the change is slight, I like it. We actually take out one of the two pairs and replace it with a single 1N4001.
C1, C7, C6, C12, C13, and C15 Change this electrolytic capacitor to a 10uF Non-polarized caps. Non-polarized caps sound better . I like these anywhere there is signal coupling at this high a value.
C14 Increase input coupling capacitor value to 0.1uF for increased bass response from your guitar.
C100 Here is where we can affect the tone control. I prefer a little more lower-midrange and bass frequencies through the tone section. You can increase the lower frequencies by increasing the capacitor value to 0.033uF. Install a switch to add a 0.068uF cap in parallel with this value for the Phat Mode!
Most of the ceramic caps are changed to Expensive Silver Mica (available through Small Bear Electronics
www.smallbearelec.com or
www.mouser.com or
www.digiley.com). This is what makes our mod sound so good. A noticeable reduction in noise. An increase in the smoothness and no harshness left. This type of upgrade is not found in anyone's mods. The best sound is right here.
