Tube Screamer Page

Finally! I was trying to make that happen like ages now. Well made TS stripboard is really hard to design, specially to me. It isn’t possible to make one without jumpers (as well as most IC based FX’s). For some reasons I don’t like jumpers, so all my entries to design it was instantly trashed. The other main reason is… well… I hate OD/Distortions in general, I’m a booster/fuzz bloke. Tubescreamer is a part of music history, almost as much iconic as all well known and loved users by over last 30 years, on top with my personal hero SRV!

Anyway… It’s done now, and I do quite like it. I couldn’t get away with jumpers (I use 0-ohm resistors instead) but it’s still quite nice. Doing this I had couple purposes in mind. Firstly – all none polarized caps at 5mm raster (two stripboard rows) and Panasonic SMF’s as a type of my choice. 100uF and 47uF’s the same – 5mm raster. Why so big? AM Silver Modded TS uses Sanyo OsCon type caps, and those values I have are 5mm raster. The other E-Cap (10uF) is 2,5mm radial, so standard stuff here.

What else… ah, yeah! The size 🙂 Will easily fit into small B sized Hammond (or similar) enclosure. I was going to make it for 125B really, it’s similar size to real TS-9, that’s why my layout shows ins and outs in upper position, nor side located. I’ll go with 125B anyway, as I have some evil plans for this project. Of course I won’t shy to show of.

Few more things needs to point out:

– Transistors. Originally seen 2SC1815 low quality noisy Q’s was changed to accommodate more ordinary pinout wise, and better quality in general 2N4401 transistors for in/out buffers, as recommended by GGG instructions.

– Optional Clipping Diode Switch pads are shown for future project extension, but you can easily crank yourself what it is, and what it does

– One none original part to standard TS series in input pull-down (anti-pop) resistor (2M2)

Two layouts for classic exemplars:

Ibanez TS-808 Tube Screamer

Ibanez TS-9 Tube Screamer

As we all know, TS series was, and still is Poo-Teeque Cart-Horse, so expect shitload of variants very soon

UPDATE 10/06/2012

Here You can find layouts for simplified TS type circuits without input and output buffers:

Son of Tube Screamer
Son of Clay Jones Overdrive
Son of Clay Jones Overdrive with added Bass knob and switchable clipping section

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…more coming  very soon