MONA LISA OVERDRIVE

alright, here is my latest offering to the faceless electronic gods of the global interweb.  it's called the Mona Lisa Overdrive after everyone's favorite cyberpunk masterpiece, and dystopian premonition written by William Gibson.  if you haven't heard of  it, check it out!  anyway, on to the the goods- 

i thought i would build something that would turn on the guys that were into the lighter side of things- something different than my usual wall of fuzz tones.  with the MLOD, you can get a heavy boost, or a light overdrive reminiscent of vintage microphone preamps.  the fancy thing about this circuit is the lack of coupling caps in the audio path- something usually reserved for mic pres and hifi circuits.  this lends itself to the "transparent",  uncolored sound happening here.  if you encounter any oscillation at the highest gain settings, simply raise the value of the 100 ohm resistor near the gain control to lower the amount of maximum gain. 

as always, if anyone happens to put this on the breadboard, or if it sounds like something you might want to build, let me know, and i'll whip up a layout for it.

take it easy!

AUDIO NOISE AND GROUNDING- WATCH THIS!

here's a VERY informative video on grounding that was posted by Paul Marossy over at DIYS.  great video.  everyone should watch.

TROUBLESHOOTING OPAMP CIRCUITS

here's a cool little protocol for troubleshooting opamp circuits for the university of exeter physics department.  it should be able to get you out of most opamp entanglements you get yourself into.

http://newton.ex.ac.uk/teaching/CDHW/Electronics2/troubleshooting.html

COOL STUFF FROM EE TIMES

here'a some interesting things i found on the ee times site.  an interesting article on audio myths, two audio amplifier design articles from john linsley hood's book, and another with a great vintage video of rca tubes being made.  very cool stuff!


http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-blogs/audio-designline-blog/4033511/Audio-Myths-Workshop-video

http://www.eetimes.com/design/audio-design/4015905/Discrete-audio-amplifier-basics--Part-1-Bipolar-junction-transistor-circuits

http://www.eetimes.com/design/audio-design/4015906/Discrete-audio-amplifier-basics--Part-2-JFETs-MOSFETs-and-other-circuit-configurations

http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-blogs/audio-designline-blog/4033497/Vacuum-tubes-A-valve-video-a-tube-amp-modeler-and-a-joke

NATIONAL SEMI AN-779

national semiconductor application note number 779 is a great resource on active, passive and switched capacitor filters.  check it out!


http://www.national.com/an/AN/AN-779.pdf

as a bonus, here is a page on designing state variable filters for audio.

https://pantherfile.uwm.edu/msw/www/StateVariable/index.html