16 February 2010

Oakley Overdrive Module

Today I finished another Oakley module. This time it is an Overdrive module. Well actually you can switch between an Overdrive effect and a Distortion effect. I think these are the oldest effects around used to give electric guitars some extra punch and overtones. There are lots of guitar pedals around you could use for this as well, but Oakley made a nice 1U MOTM format module for it with two effects in one and of course it is more suitable for synthesizers. In the picture you can see that the wiring of this module is actually very simple. Just two jacks and one double pole switch to wire.

Well actually the whole module is quite easy and straight forward to build. There is no calibration to be done either. So after soldering the wires I hooked it up to the lab power supply to test it. I put a triangle wave on the input from the PC function generator. And if you look closely on the oscilloscope you can see an example what you can make from that. I haven't attached it yet to a sound source, but I believe what I see on the oscilloscope ;) I tested all functionality and decided it was done.

Then I put the knobs on and mounted it in my cabinet. As you can see there are three pot meters on the module. The top on is gain and that is on the input side, so with that pot meter you can determine how much signal is going in to the effect. In the middle is the timbre control that makes it possible to change the color (and so the shape) of the output signal and below is a dry/wet mix control. Which make is possible to regulate if you only want the input signal or add a little effect to it or by turning it all the way up you have the fully distorted signal. Then the switch to select on of the two effect modes and the input and output jack. All very straight forward, but a nice effect to have in the modular setup I think. Well that is all I can really say about it :)

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