The Boss SD-1 Super Overdrive effect pedal is a classical overdrive circuit for electric guitars. It consists of commonly found building blocks, namely common collector circuits for input and output buffering, the distortion stage as an op amp circuit with diodes in the feed-back, and a tone-control block as a parametric linear circuit around an op amp. In this paper, we analyze the circuit to derive a digital model where carefully applied simplifications strike a good balance between faithful emulation and computational efficiency. Due to the generality of the analyzed sub-circuits, the results should also be easily transferable to the many similar sub-circuits found in other effect units.

Authors: Holters, Martin; Dempwolf, Kristjan; Zölzer, Udo
Affiliation: Helmut Schmidt University, Hamburg, Germany
AES Convention: 131 (October 2011) Paper Number: 8506
Publication Date: October 19, 2011
Subject: Posters: Production and Analysis of Musical Sounds

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