pre-amp - A replacement for my poor broken guitar amp
I started playing guitar several years ago, first on a tiny classical guitar, but later on an electric guitar. My trusty guitar amp has been great, and has enabled me to learn quite a lot in a relatively short time. Unfortunately though, as of about a year or so ago, the distortion circuit started to go.
This manifested as, one time, I would power it up, and it would distort fine, the next, it would be a 100% clean tone. I don't mind clean guitar, but when I want to play blues, I want my guitar to sound more like Stevie Ray Vaughn than Chet Atkins. Usually I could fix the problem by power cycling the amp though, so I was ok with it.
About a month ago, however, power cycling stopped working, and it stayed clean all the time. That is clearly not going to work for me, so I tore the amp apart to try to find out what was wrong. Nothing was immediately obvious, and as my skill with analog circuitry could most generously be described as "budding", I decided I would do something I've wanted to do for a long time, and simply build a distorting pre-amp.
So, I consulted with my roommate, who happens to know a fair amount about analog circuitry, and discussed what it would take to make this happen. I found a schematic that I liked the sound of, and the parts are on order.
This project is incomplete, I will update as I do more of it.
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